Irish cancer patients missing out on life-saving trials due to funding disparity
Cancer patients have to travel long distances to participate in potentially life-saving clinical trials because of shortages of research staff and uneven funding for regional programmes, an Oireachtas committee has heard.Cancer Trials Ireland chief executive Angela Clayton-Lea told members of the Oireachtas Committee on Further and Higher Education that short-term, project-based contracts were hampering recruitment and retention and preventing Dublin-based staff from being able to buy homes. Most cancer research funding goes to the capital. Dr Veronica McInerney, cancer clinical trials programme manager for the HSE West and North West region, said clinical research staff, including nurses and radiation therapists, accounted for just 0.5 per cent of staff but posts are usually not ring-fenced or permanent.“Research is currently seen as an add-on, something extra, when really the value of research needs to be articulated and included in workforce planning,” she said.READ MOREOwners await demolition of Meath home built more than 20 years ago without permissionJoe Kent and Tucker Carlson add new dimension to Trump’s attempts to justify Iran warZohran Mamdani has no opinion on a united Ireland. That matters more than you think‘A display of polite pushback’: How world’s media covered Micheál Martin’s meeting with TrumpClayton-Lea said that in the early 2000s a prostate patient came for 37 treatments of radiotherapy which has since been reduced to five due to advanced treatment developed with research. In the cases of drug trials, some patients would benefit immediately but where a drug was ultimately approved for use, more work generally needed to be done to see how little of it could be effective so as to reduce the impact of side effects on patients through smaller doses or breaks to treatment.The committee heard, however, that while €10.8 million in public funding was allocated to cancer trial research programmes in the east of the country between 2021 and 2026, just €600,000 went to the West North West region, with a similar amount going to Limerick. “That doesn’t buy an awful lot of manpower,” McInerney said.A number of regions did not have the funds to employ the specialist skills required to complete trials and “the consequences for patients in those regions are very real”.She cited the example of patients in Tullamore, Co Offaly having to be brought to Dublin or Galway to participate in trials. [ Cancer deaths to reach more than 18 million globally per year by 2050, study findsOpens in new window ]Clayton-Lea said the nature of the funding in Dublin meant many specialist nurses and other staff could expect to be employed long term because as one research project concluded another would commence. However, they could not secure a mortgage because their contract ended with an individual project.Dr Raymond Healy, director of registration at the Nursing and Midwifery Board of Ireland, told the committee that Ireland remains heavily reliant on general and psychiatric nurses, and midwives trained abroad. “Last year, over 5,000 first time registrants came from outside of Ireland, while the number of Irish-educated graduates joining the register has remained stable,” he said. Ireland is now one of the most internationally reliant nursing workforces within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “As other countries face their own shortages, we cannot assume that the supply will continue,” Healy said. The number of Irish nurses seeking documentation to work abroad was down, however, from 5,000 in 2023 to 1,800 last year, the committee heard.
