Quality not location is priority, says cancer boss
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Monday May 19 2008
THOUSANDS of campaigners who want to retain their local cancer services have been told they must comes to terms with change and travel.
That's the message from Professor Tom Keane, the man charged with revolutionising Ireland's cancer care strategy, on the proposed eight new centres of excellence for cancer care.
He says the debate has become bogged down with geography, and arguments about where cancer care centres will be based.
He said cancer patients and their families must get away from focusing on how far they will have to travel for treatment, and concentrate instead on the quality of service they would receive.
In an address to the AGM of the Irish College of GPs in Galway, Prof Keane noted that there was no debate or criticism of the distances patients had to travel for specialist cardiovascular treatment.
While it would be great to have cancer care facilities in every community in the country, this was simply not possible, he said. "There has to be some kind of trade-off. I don't accept that travelling 70 or 80 miles for vastly improved cancer treatment is too much," he added.
"People don't appear to be too bothered by having to travel a distance for cardiovascular care in this country -- yet there seems to be a difficulty when it comes to cancer care."
Prof Keane acknowledged that the selection of the eight designated centres of excellence was controversial, but radical changes were required if Ireland was to copy programmes that had been a success elsewhere around the world.
Prof Keane is currently on leave of absence from the British Columbia Cancer Agency in Canada.
Population
British Columbia has a similar population to Ireland, but a cancer care programme was rolled out there 60 years ago.
British Columbia now has the lowest rate of cancer mortality in Canada, which, in turn, has one of the lowest cancer death rates anywhere in the world.
He reiterated the need to base experts in the proposed eight centres of excellence in Ireland to ensure the best diagnosis and treatment. Follow-up care, however, needed to be provided in local settings.
"In places like British Columbia it can often take a full day for patients to travel to cancer treatment. However, most of the follow-up care is then available locally and that is the model we need to adopt," he said.
Prof Keane was also critical of the way Irish resources were being used in cancer care. Up to five times more beds were being taken up by cancer care than was the norm in countries with more efficient programmes, he pointed out.
He also acknowledged that family doctors were disconnected from the overall cancer care strategy here and argued that this needed to change as doctors on the ground were key to making the new strategy work.
And he called for greater accountability with regard to resources.
"I cannot accept that the reason we do not have good cancer control is just because we don't have enough resources," he said.
- Brian McDonald
