Professor John Kennedy

There's no doubt about it.

And, of course, Irish people, trainees who go to work in America, go to the very best centers.

So they're not going to a mediocre center in the middle of a pretty isolated area.

They're going to the major centers in the major East Coast cities, and they see the very best that those centers can provide.

So that is a little bit of a shock, but it does give you an insight into what is feasible and what is possible.

And it gives you guidance in how you should be developing your services and how you should work to develop those services over time.

Yeah, that's a great question.

The first thing to say is we have very substantially increasing demands upon the resources, and I'm not convinced that we have the plan in place or the capacity to deliver that efficiently and effectively for patients.

There are a variety of reasons for that.

Firstly, we have an increasing population.

So the population has increased by 15% over the last 10 years, but the population of people over 65 has increased by 36%.

And those are the people that get cancer.

So the first thing to say is that pure, simple demographics tell us that we have an increasing demand all the time.

Secondly, we have far better therapies for patients.

So there is a much wider range of active treatments for patients that are effective.

And therefore, those patients require more treatment.

They live longer.

They require more follow-up, more scanning.

There's just a series, a host of factors that are increasingly pushing on demand and resource allocation.

And that's only going to go in one direction.