A cancer specialist in the southeast has organised the purchase of a fleet of vehicles driven by volunteers to transport patients who require radiotherapy.
Gordon Watson, who has just retired as a cancer surgeon at Waterford Regional Hospital, is chairman of the South East Radiotherapy Trust which has started bringing patients who require radiotherapy from their homes to hospitals.
The trust has raised money through fundraising events and to date has launched the service in counties Waterford and Kilkenny. It hopes to expand into Carlow, Wexford and south Tipperary in the near future.
At the formal launch of the Kilkenny service yesterday cancer patient Brenda Grace, who has just undergone 25 days of radiotherapy at the Whitfield Clinic in Waterford - a daily return journey of over 100 km from Kilkenny - praised the service, saying without it she would have had to stay in a hotel.
Dr Watson criticised the lack of services for cancer patients in the southeast and accused the State of failing to plan for a projected doubling of the number of cancer sufferers by 2020.
While the Government has promised to provide radiotherapy at Waterford Regional Hospital since 2002, this is not now expected until 2013, a situation he said is "unacceptable".
No public hospital in the southeast region provides radiotherapy services for cancer patients. Typically, patients need about five minutes treatment a day, five days a week, for about five weeks.
Traditionally, patients in the southeast have travelled to either Dublin or Cork, or had to stay in hospital throughout the course of their treatment.
The Whitfield Clinic, a new private hospital in Waterford, launched a radiotherapy service recently and the Health Service Executive (HSE) has an agreement with the clinic to provide public cancer patients with the option of radiotherapy treatment there.
A HSE spokesman said "this is an interim arrangement while Waterford Regional awaits two linear accelerators (the machines used to provide radiotherapy to cancer patients) as part of the National Radiation Oncology Plan".
