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Cancer professor urges North West to unite 15.07.08

PEOPLE in Donegal have been urged to band together with the rest of the North West to lobby for one specialist cancer centre.
But Professor John Crown who was keynote speaker at the Donegal Action for Cancer Care (DACC) conference 'Up Here We're Dying to Live', warned that the people of the Donegal, Leitrim and Sligo would first have to agree upon where that centre would be built.
He said the region would have around 250,000 people in the coming years and this would be enough critical mass to support a comprehensive cancer centre. Some small cities in the US with around the same population support two such centres, he said.
"You need to get together and form a North Western cancer action group. You should come together and say we don't care where it (cancer centre) is but some place within this tri-county area we are going to push for one comprehensive cancer centre which will have all the surgery, all the radiotherapy and the mammography will be read by a good mammographer."
Prof Crown said he believed there has been an attempt to "buy off" Donegal by giving the county a partial cancer service.
Meanwhile, Prof Crown was scathing of
Professor John Crown
the National Strategy for Cancer Control's proposed centres of excellence.
"When I hear them talking about the proposed new centres of excellence... I mean saying that a centre is going to be excellent before one brick has been put down to build the centre, is a bit like looking into your lover's eyes over a glass of champagne and deciding that the baby you will create is going to become a piano virtuoso," he said.
Meanwhile, he said Ireland had a 'Paris Hilton health service' where the wealthy get seen quickly and the poor languish on hospital waiting lists.
Donegal Action for Cancer Care members back from left, Sean O'Donnell, Paddy Hume, Grainne Gillen (Inishowen) and Noel Coyle.Front from left, Betty Holmes, Alana Coyle and Mary McCallion (Inishowen). Prof Crown, medical oncologist at St. Vincent's Hospital, Dublin, likened patients' choices within the new national co-location plan to the wealthy hotel heiress getting on a plane.
"Paris once famously said that when she got into an airplane she wanted to make sure she was always turning left into first
class and not turning right into coach," said Prof Crown.
"The new plan for co-located public and private hospitals should just be called the 'Paris Hilton System' because that is what it's going to be. You will walk into the hospital corridor, turn left for the co-located private (hospital) and turn right for the co-located public."
He described the co-location model as "insane".
"It's insane and what makes it insane is that we have different funding mechanisms and they incentivise different treatment behaviours.
"If the bureaucrats think they can legislate fairness into these co-located campuses they're wrong because with the private, the hospital is getting paid for treating patients and the doctor is getting paid for treating patients while with the public, doctors are being paid to keep patients on waiting lists," he said.
The medical oncologist referred to the late Susie Long who died of colon cancer after waiting as a public patient for a colonoscopy for eight months.
"I believe Susie was killed because of the health system. There is no rational health system in the world that makes people wait for a colonoscopy. It just doesn't happen," he said. And he said Ms. Long's wait for treatment was not an isolated case. He recently learned of an 80 year old woman who could not be told even what year her cataract operation would take place. She "only wanted to read her prayer book", he said. He said the current wait for patients in the west to see a rheumatology specialist was 18 months despite clinical research showing that young rheumatoid arthritis patients, in particular, needed to be treated urgently.
Also speaking at the conference in the Mount Errigal Hotel on Saturday was T.D., and GP, Dr. James McDaid who stressed the need for diagnostic equipment to be made available in the primary healthcare centres of the future.
Meanwhile, Prof Crown hit out at Ireland's shortage of consultants and "crushing patient load". He acknowledged a 'very large grant' from the Health Research Board this year that has allowed him to devote more time to research. But he revealed that while in full-time clinical practice, he was seeing 90 to 100 patients a day most days of the week. "There is no country in the world where a cancer specialist sees 90 to 100 patients a day," he said, outlining the resulting "huge risk implications, hurried consultations and unbelievably awful record keeping". He hit out at the HSE's "burgeoning army of spin doctors" and the practise of spending money on PR people instead of clinical specialists.
Prof Crown, whose late father was from Manorhamilton in Co Leitrim, urged DACC and the people of the north west to band together and lobby for one specialist cancer centre. But he warned they would first have to agree upon which hospital - either Sligo or Letterkenny - it would be located.
And he was scathing of the centres of excellence proposed under the National Cancer Strategy for Cancer Control.
"When I hear them talking about these proposed new centres of excellence... I mean saying that a centre is going to be excellent before one brick has been put down to build the centre, is a bit like looking into your lover's eyes over a glass of champagne and deciding that the baby you will create is going to become a piano virtuoso,” he said. He praised the strides being made to boost Irish cancer survival rates but called for the bureaucracy to be taken out of the healthcare system. He urged policy makers to adopt a universal single-tier social insurance system based on the Austrian, Swiss and German models. This would see every person in Ireland pay the same percentage of their income to a not-for-profit national health insurance scheme. For Prof Crown's views on the Lisbon Treaty and his "penniless" father, click here .
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