Health briefing

A round-up of today's other stories in brief

Women run for Dr Walls research fund

More than 50 people ran the Women's Mini Marathon in memory of Dr Eithne Walls, who died along with Dr Aisling Butler and Dr Jane Deasy in the Air France crash in 2009. They included 18 Riverdancers taking part to raise money for the Eithne Walls Fund for the Royal Victoria Eye and Ear Hospital's Research Foundation. Last week Taoiseach Enda Kenny presented the Eithne Walls Memorial Medal to Dr Mei Chuen Tay at the opening of the new Education and Conference Centre at the hospital.

HSE faces shortfall in funding acute hospitals

THE HEALTH Service Executive (HSE) is facing a funding shortfall in its acute hospital network for the remainder of the year with new figures showing an overspend of more than €60 million across the network for the first quarter of this year. The State’s 30 major acute hospitals have overspent by €64.2 million for the first three months of this year, according to new figures provided through the HSE’s Healthstat evaluation system.

All hospitals must come in on budget and HSE managers will be required to put in place measures to contain costs for the remainder of the year.

The overspend is against a background of the HSE cutting its hospitals’ budget for this year by €219 million to €4.167 billion.

The Healthstat figures show that most acute hospitals are struggling to stay within their reduced budget levels.

The biggest offender is the Midwest Regional Hospital in Limerick, where the overspend for the first quarter is €8.47 million, or 25 per cent over budget.

The reconfiguration of health services in the midwest is having a negative impact on the hospital’s finances and the HSE West has proposed a plan to deal with the overspend in Limerick and the midwest area. Cork University Hospital has overspent by €5 million with St Vincent’s Hospital in Dublin overspending by €4.8 million and University College Hospital Galway by €4.4 million.

A spokesman for the Minister for Health, Dr James Reilly, last night appeared to rule out any additional funding to make up the anticipated shortfall.

New drugs may slow progress of skin cancer

TWO NEW drugs that use very different scientific approaches can extend survival among patients with the deadliest form of skin cancer, offering the first new hope for real progress in many years.

Advanced melanoma patients taking an experimental pill, Vemurafenib, developed by Roche and Daiichi Sankyo were 63 per cent less likely to die than patients given chemotherapy, according to a new trial presented on Sunday at a meeting of the American Society of Clinical Oncology in Chicago.

Dr Paul Chapman of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and the study’s lead investigator called the results an “unprecedented level of difference” for patients with advanced melanoma, who typically survive just eight months on current treatments.

In a separate study presented at the American Society of Clinical Oncology, previously untreated people with advanced melanoma treated with Bristol-Myers Squibb’s Yervoy, or ipilimumab, plus chemotherapy lived an average of two months longer than those given only chemotherapy.

Yervoy works by spurring the immune system to fight off the cancer. Vemurafenib is designed for use in patients with tumours that have a mutation in a gene known as BRAF that allows melanoma cells to grow. About half of all melanomas have the genetic aberration.

The Roche trial included 675 patients with previously untreated, inoperable late-stage metastatic melanoma with the BRAF mutation. After a median three months of treatment, Vemurafenib patients also had a 74 per cent reduction in the risk of cancer progression compared with Dacarbazine.