Breast cancer services to close at many more small hospitals across the State
BREAST CANCER services are to be closed down at several more smaller hospitals across the State by the end of this year, it has been confirmed.
Prof Tom Keane, the interim director of the State's national cancer control programme, said yesterday he expects breast cancer services to be moved from hospitals in Tralee, Sligo, Castlebar, Wexford, Kilkenny and Drogheda later this year.
The services are to be moved to eight designated cancer centres, where patients can expect to have their diagnosis and treatment decided on by multidisciplinary teams, which should improve outcomes.
It had been expected that services would be moved from the smaller hospitals over the next two years, but Prof Keane said the transfer of services was now way ahead of target.
He had hoped to have 60 per cent of breast cancer services for public patients transferred to the designated centres by the end of this year but in fact it now appears almost all breast cancer care will be transferred by the end of this year.
He told The Irish Times that a review of what was needed in the larger centres to cope with the extra workload had taken place and €6 million would now be spent on recruiting extra staff. A small portion of the money will also go on equipment.
Prof Keane said that even before smaller centres were closing, patients in their catchment areas were "voting with their feet" and being referred to the designated centres "even though they may still have a choice to attend their local hospital". He believed this was most likely attributable to all the recent publicity around cancer care at smaller hospitals.
Regarding the events in Portlaoise, he said: "I think it's terrible it happened and my focus is to reduce the risk of it ever happening again."
A review of mammograms at Portlaoise Hospital last year found nine women had wrongly been given the all-clear for breast cancer. It meant some women were not correctly diagnosed for more than two years. Poor equipment was partly to blame but so too was the lack of triple assessment of patients by a multidisciplinary team.
The transfer of breast cancer services from Portlaoise to Dublin's St Vincent's Hospital will be completed by the end of March. On waiting times for colonoscopies, which can be up to 18 months, Prof Keane said he would engage with the HSE's National Hospitals Office to improve access. The triage of patients referred for the diagnostic tests also needed to be improved, as did capacity to carry out the examinations, he added.
Prof Keane said discussions would also shortly be taking place with specialists treating lung cancer and prostate cancer on where the care of these patients should be located in future, in an effort to provide patients with the best possible outcomes.
Meanwhile, Christine Murphy-Whyte, chairwoman of Europa Donna Ireland, which is comprised entirely of Irish volunteers who have experience of breast cancer, said yesterday there should be no more turf wars or dithering about where breast cancer care is provided.
"We need to move on the resourcing, staffing and quality assuring of procedures and practices in our specialist breast centres as a matter of urgency.
"Politicians and the HSE need to end the turf wars and get behind Prof Tom Keane and assure him of continued support in his urgent efforts to bring about improvements speedily," she said.