Breast cancerUp to five women a year in Donegal are having a breast removed unnecessarily because they cannot travel to Dublin to get the radiotherapy treatment they need.
Regional director of cancer services in the north west Dr Kevin Moran said: "We still have women who are opting to have a mastectomy as distinct from more conservative surgery." He said it was "absolutely horrific" that women were being forced to make such a choice.
He said there were an average of 50 new cases of breast cancer diagnosed in Donegal each year, and he believed it was "a reasonable estimate" that some five women a year were opting for mastectomies when the medical advice would be for them to have a lump removed followed by an intensive course of radiotherapy.
Donegal cancer patients who require radiotherapy must spend at least six weeks in Dublin receiving treatment every weekday.
A recently formed campaign group, Donegal Action for Cancer Care, is arguing that it is sometimes impossible for people - particularly women with young children - to leave home for six weeks to get the radiotherapy they need. In addition, people are being forced to wait for long periods - often months - before they get radiotherapy.
Dr Moran is supporting the campaign and is arguing for a satellite radiotherapy clinic to be provided in Donegal. He said that men with prostrate cancer in Donegal were waiting for up to six months before they got radiotherapy in Dublin. "In the case of rectal cancer, for best outcome, a patient should have radiotherapy before surgery but people here are not getting that - they are just going ahead with the surgery."
In the final stages of cancer, radiotherapy is also very effective in pain relief, but because terminally ill patients cannot travel, they are denied this, he said.
Minister for Health Mary Harney is shortly due to announce a reorganisation of cancer services and the campaign group fears that services in Donegal may deteriorate even further.
While Sligo is a designated cancer centre and has a radiation oncologist, there is no radiation oncologist assigned to Letterkenny General Hospital. Campaign spokeswoman Trish Hegarty said: "It has been shown that if a radiation oncologist is part of a patient's multidisciplinary team, they have a 20 per cent better chance of survival. And because we live in Donegal we don't think we should have less of a chance of surviving than people anywhere else. All we want is equal access."
Dr Moran said that in wanting a satellite radiotherapy clinic in the longer term they were calling for a system that had worked very successfully in Canada, Scandinavia, and New Zealand in areas with geographically dispersed populations.
He stressed he would only want a service that met the international "gold standard" in cancer care but internationally the "hub and spoke" model had met such standards.
Since the campaign started a month ago, there are now eight local branches of Donegal Action for Cancer Care throughout the county.