A radical shake-up of the manner in which cancer services are delivered across the State is to be announced today.
The Health Service Executive and Minister for Health Mary Harney will announce that, in future, cancer care will be provided at about eight designated centres across the State.
Smaller hospitals will no longer be allowed provide cancer care, in the interests of patient safety. All patients will in future, under the plan, have access to multidisciplinary care.
The designated cancer centres are expected to be located at a number of hospitals in Dublin as well as in Cork, Limerick, Galway and, possibly, Waterford.
Ms Harney has already indicated that people should expect some "rationalisation" of where cancer care is provided.
And following recent controversy over the quality of breast cancer care provided at a number of hospitals, details will also be unveiled today of where breast cancer services are to be provided in future.
Meanwhile the inquiry into breast cancer care at Barringtons private hospital in Limerick will be conducted by a team selected by the hospital itself but approved by the Department of Health, it was confirmed yesterday.
A spokesman for the Department of Health stressed the inquiry would be carried out "under the auspices of Barringtons" rather than under the auspices of the Department of Health.
It will review the care given to women who presented for breast cancer treatment at Barringtons between September 2003 and August 2007.
The inquiry team, including a number of cancer specialists, is due to meet for the first time this week and will use draft terms of reference drawn up by the department. The team must complete its review by the end of October.
Asked who was paying for the review, the spokesman for the department indicated that hadn't yet been decided. He refused to name the four members of the inquiry team.
Barringtons hit the headlines last month after it was asked by the Department of Health to suspend its treatment of breast cancer patients, when concerns were raised about the manner in which 10 breast cancer patients in particular were cared for there.
Details of the cases were sent to the Health Information and Quality Authority by the director of cancer services in the midwest Prof Rajnish Gupta, and were examined by two independent experts, who expressed serious concern at what they found.
Since then it has emerged the Department of Health was aware of specific concerns about the quality of breast cancer services at Barringtons as far back as January 2006, some 19 months before it took action to address them. It also informed the HSE chief executive Prof Brendan Drumm about them.
But Prof Drumm has insisted he could not have acted on them as it was a private hospital, over which the HSE had no remit.