Cork needs cancer care machines replaced 'within four years'

The ageing machinery used in cancer care is “a national disgrace”, oncologists say, with patients outside Dublin particularly impacted.

One patient’s machine broke in six of 25 radiotherapy appointments, and other patients are booking hotels while waiting for machines to be fixed.

Radiotherapy for up to 50% of cancer patients in Ireland is delivered by 23 linear accelerators. They should be used for 10 years, but the fleet here is the “oldest in Europe”, akin to working with Windows 95, the Oireachtas health committee heard yesterday.

Professor Aisling Barry said that 80% of machines used in Cork, Galway, and Dublin hospitals need to be replaced now or within a few years.

Prof Barry, chair of radiation oncology at University College Cork, said the only replacement plan is for St Luke’s Oncology Radiation Network (SLON) of hospitals around Dublin.

In the Cork Cancer Centre, the machines are between five and a half and six and a half years old. There is no national plan to upgrade them. “I would not really call the Cork ones new,” she said.

While the SLON hospitals do upgrades, there are funding issues elsewhere.

“Cork and Galway are going to be a disaster,” she said. “Cork needs all their machines replaced in the next four years. That’s not going to happen when Dublin has so many machines needing to be replaced now.”

She said the “regional inequity” is already being seen, and works both ways at times.

University College Cork offers a radiation therapy training course, and numbers have been increased there, as well as at the Dublin course in Trinity College Dublin.

One gain is that Cork patients are no longer being outsourced to private radiotherapy clinics.

“A lot of our outsourcing was down to staff shortages and challenges with that,” Prof Barry said.

“This has really come along significantly, and we’ve not had to outsource patients in the last number of months.”

Cancer Society director of advocacy and communications, Steve Dempsey, said the division of the HSE into regions is now raising questions about national planning for cancer.

The national cancer strategy runs out this year, but he said it has not yet been fully funded.