Expensive cancer treatment machines lying idle in Cork hospitals, says TD

SINN Féin TD for Cork South-Central, Donnchadh Ó Laoghaire, has criticised that two expensive machines in Cork hospitals that can be used to help cancer patients are not in use.

He said that a linear accelerator — a machine that uses electricity to form a stream of fast-moving subatomic particles, creating high-energy radiation that may be used to treat cancer — is never used. A CT scanner — which detects the presence of tumours, where they are, and how big they are — is also lying idle, and has been for three years.

Speaking in the Dáil during a Sinn Féin motion on cancer services, Mr Ó Laoghaire said: “Very few people in this country are not touched by the ravages of cancer.”

He said that while significant progress has been made in some respects over the last few years, “in the course of the last cancer strategy and under the stewardship of three ministers for health, Deputies Harris, Varadkar, and Donnelly, we have gone backwards.”

Open letter

It comes as 21 doctors and researchers including Prof Seamus O’Reilly, a consultant medical oncologist at Cork University Hospital, signed an open letter to Mr Harris.

They said that the National Cancer Strategy “has only received proper funding in two of the seven budgets” since Mr Harris introduced it in 2017, when he was minister for health.

Mr Ó Laoghaire said: “In five of the last seven years, the strategy has not received enough funding, and only one of the 23 objectives in the current strategy has been met.”

Maddening

“There is much concern among people who are working in the area of cancer,” he said, adding that there are numerous problems, many of them to do with recruitment in the sector, and that in Cork, there is equipment that is not being used.

He said: “In Cork, one linear accelerator is never used. One CT scanner is idle and never used. It has been lying idle for three years. How galling is that to families who have cancer? It is absolutely maddening.”

Calling this “simply not good enough,” he said Sinn Féin has a plan to resolve this, which includes “ensuring there is adequate funding and, crucially, addressing the recruitment embargo, which is such a blunt instrument and is doing significant damage across the health system as a whole.”