MINISTER FOR Health Mary Harney has defended the policy of designating eight hospitals as specialist cancer centres and said she was confident that problems identified in one of them – Waterford Regional Hospital – had been rectified or were being addressed.
The Irish Timesreported yesterday that an unpublished report into services at Waterford, one of the designated "centres of excellence" for breast cancer, found that it was failing to meet 36 of 48 national standards when assessed last October.
The assessment was carried out by the Health Information and Quality Authority on October 2nd, at about the same time patients from three other hospitals in the region were moved to Waterford.
Commenting on the report yesterday, Ms Harney said that at the time it was researched, none of the eight centres would have met the standards, either because they did not have the volume of patients, the clinical expertise or the diagnostic equipment at the time.
“Some of [the issues] have been addressed and eliminated, others are in the process of being addressed because we’re recruiting new consultants into the cancer control programme,” she told journalists.
Separately, Ms Harney told RTÉ Radio: “These are not minimum standards. They’re not patient safety standards. These are the standards we have to aspire to.”
However, an authority spokesman told The Irish Timesthat the standards were set against international best practice and had to be complied with.
“The standards are not aspirational. They’re a set of standards that are there, that these centres have to comply with, and that’s it,” the spokesman said.
Ms Harney yesterday launched a report which showed that death rates from cancer were 4 per cent lower in Northern Ireland compared with the Republic over the period 1994-2004, although overall cancer survival continues to improve throughout the island.
She said the improved survival rates were encouraging, and the gap between Northern Ireland and the Republic could be explained by an earlier reorganisation of cancer services in the North, as well as the earlier introduction of screening programmes there.
“In 1995 in Northern Ireland, they began to reorganise their services and centralise their cancer treatments. They have one cancer centre in Belfast.
“We have only begun to do that in the last two years. So they were way ahead of us in terms of the reorganisation of services,” she said.
“Secondly, they have had screening programmes in place in Northern Ireland for breast cancer and cervical cancer for a considerable length of time.”
She added that on breast cancer, Ireland had the most improved survival rate of all OECD countries.
She was also encouraged in recent weeks when Prof Tom Keane, director of the National Cancer Control Programme, told a Cabinet sub-committee that by the end of this year he believed Ireland would have one of the top three breast cancer services in the world.
In a statement, the HSE said that in Waterford, 195 new breast cancer cases were diagnosed last year and additional radiography, surgical, nursing and administrative support staff had been appointed, augmenting the staff who were already in place.
“The National Cancer Care Programme is satisfied that a high-quality, safe service is being delivered, while recognising that further progress is needed in some areas as the service develops,” the statement said.
It added that while many of the standards were being met at the time of last year’s assessment, including the caseloads being seen by individual surgeons, “there was an issue regarding documentary evidence demonstrating this”.
“There was never an expectation that all of the targets and standards would be met immediately . . . The objective, once the guidelines and standards were agreed, was to establish an initial benchmark against which progress would be subsequently measured.”
