Public patients will have access to radiotherapy treatment at the private Whitfield Clinic in Waterford from next month after an agreement was reached between the clinic and the Health Service Executive (HSE).
Though a service level agreement has yet to be signed, it is understood that the clinic will shortly be in compliance with all guidelines set down by the Department of Health for centres treating public patients, and will receive public patients from early January.
The breakthrough follows a campaign by a patients' pressure group and local politicians, who argued that public patients should be treated at the recently-opened clinic on an interim basis until a public facility becomes available at Waterford Regional Hospital.
The University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) Whitfield Clinic opened last month with one linear accelerator, a specialist piece of radiotherapy equipment. However, under Department of Health guidelines, all centres treating public patients must have two linear accelerators.
Dr Jim Madden of Whitfield clinic said a second liner accelerator would be commissioned within two weeks and it would then be compliant with all 13 guidelines.
Fianna Fáil TD Ollie Wilkinson welcomed the agreement, saying it was unacceptable that patients were travelling more than 100 miles for treatment.
The chairman of the Southeast Radiotherapy Campaign Committee, Dick Roche, has said that Minister for Health Mary Harney gave a commitment to the campaign group in August 2005 that a clinic, with two linear accelerators, would be built in the grounds of Waterford hospital under a public private partnership by 2008.
But he cautioned that even if the Whitfield Clinic treats some 800 patients a year, it still won't meet the needs of the southeast.
Annually some 1,800 patients from the southeast are forced to go to Dublin or Cork for radiotherapy treatment.
The HSE said in a statement it welcomed the availability of radiotherapy services in the private sector.
