Professor John Kennedy

So the great news is that we have about a quarter of a million people in Ireland who have been probably cured of their cancer and all likelihood have certainly survived their treatment and look like they're doing very well.

But they will have toxicities of treatment and toxicities of their disease that will last and that will require ongoing care.

So that's kind of the price of success.

And that is an area that has been focused on recently, but we'll need more of that.

Those services are in evolution.

They are improving.

The NCCP has done quite a bit of work developing those.

Individual cancer centres develop those as well.

But we need to be able to provide services for patients who've had surgery for prostate cancer, who've had radiation therapy to their head and neck.

I mean, all these things produce long-term ongoing issues.

The other point I would make out is that we have a host of new treatments for cancer that are based on immune therapy and they have produced phenomenal results for diseases that previously were very difficult to treat like malignant melanoma and lung cancer, etc.

But they produce long-term toxicities in terms of thyroid failure, adrenal failure, endocrine problems that are going to be lifelong and we need to be in a position to deal with all of those.

So the resource demands are continually increasing.

Well, I think that's a very broad question that has quite a subtle answer to it.

There are areas where clearly those therapies are available and be given for patients, but the indications expand all the time.

And the numbers of new drugs coming on the scene is increasingly at a rapid rate.

So I would just point out to you that in the 90s,

I think there was something like between five and eight new drugs approved for cancer care by the FDA in America.

Now it's in the region of 20 a year.

And these are all novel drugs with novel side effects.