Minister for Health Mary Harney yesterday opened two new €1.5 million cancer treatment services at Tallaght hospital.
The new services - a 20-space oncology day unit and a centre for the treatment of diseases related to the pancreas, including cancer of the pancreas - aim to locate on one site a range of supports which patients would previously have had to travel elsewhere to receive. However, speaking at the opening ceremony, the hospital's consultant oncologist, Dr Ray McDermott, warned that although the oncology day unit was a very welcome development, there remained a need for dedicated beds to treat some 17 inpatients per night.
Currently the service, which expects to see about 7,000 patients this year, relies on the goodwill of colleagues elsewhere in the hospital to find places for these patients. This was contributing to A&E overcrowding at the hospital, he said.
"We probably do need some more support in terms of strengthening the service, and I think that would be one of the key things we would hope to do in the future with the support of the Tánaiste," Dr McDermott said. "Patients with cancer get priority so they don't have to go to A&E. But we are causing some of the backlog in A&E. I would think that any cancer service of the magnitude that we have would need dedicated beds."
Ms Harney said it was up to hospital management to decide how it designated beds. "There's an increasing tendency for more and more hospital services to be provided on a daycare basis - you go in in the morning and you go home in the evening - and less activity being done on an inpatient basis," she said. "And we've got to continue with that process."
There are about 600 cases of cancer of the pancreas in Ireland per year. But Prof Kevin Conlon, consultant general surgeon at the hospital, warned that pancreatitis was on the increase in Ireland, particularly among young people in their 20s presenting with alcohol-induced pancreatitis.This was a "very worrying" trend, Ms Harney said. "But the good story from today is that all of the team of experts that provide services to those that suffer from this illness are being brought together in a single centre."
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