{"id":353229,"date":"2026-03-18T21:35:08","date_gmt":"2026-03-18T21:35:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/353229\/"},"modified":"2026-03-18T21:35:08","modified_gmt":"2026-03-18T21:35:08","slug":"irish-cancer-patients-missing-out-on-life-saving-trials-due-to-funding-disparity-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/353229\/","title":{"rendered":"Irish cancer patients missing out on life-saving trials due to funding disparity \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Cancer<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

Dr Veronica McInerney, cancer clinical trials programme manager for the HSE<\/a> 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.<\/p>\n

\u201cResearch is currently seen as an add-on, something extra, when really the value of research needs to be articulated and included in workforce planning,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Clayton-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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

The committee heard, however, that while \u20ac10.8 million in public funding was allocated to cancer trial research programmes in the east of the country between 2021 and 2026, just \u20ac600,000 went to the West North West region, with a similar amount going to Limerick. \u201cThat doesn\u2019t buy an awful lot of manpower,\u201d McInerney said.<\/p>\n

A number of regions did not have the funds to employ the specialist skills required to complete trials and \u201cthe consequences for patients in those regions are very real\u201d.<\/p>\n

She cited the example of patients in Tullamore, Co Offaly having to be brought to Dublin or Galway to participate in trials. <\/p>\n

[\u00a0Cancer deaths to reach more than 18 million globally per year by 2050, study findsOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

\u201cLast 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,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Ireland is now one of the most internationally reliant nursing workforces within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). <\/p>\n

\u201cAs other countries face their own shortages, we cannot assume that the supply will continue,\u201d Healy said. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Cancer patients have to travel long distances to participate in potentially life-saving clinical trials because of shortages of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":353230,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[258,103,2120,61,60,10911],"class_list":["post-353229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-cancer","tag-health","tag-hse","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-nursing-and-midwifery-board-of-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353229"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353229\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/353230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}