Next week, the Dáil’s Health and Children Committee will be considering the Health (Miscellaneous Provisions) Bill 2010. Behind such an innocuous sounding Bill lies the intention to close down St Luke’s cancer hospital.
I have seen one of perhaps many letters submitted to the Dáil Committee from a person whose husband is suffering from cancer and receiving treatment in St Luke’s. Their experience has been that the facilities at St Luke’s are the best of what is available in Ireland for the treatment of cancer and that with its 18 acre site, it has has plenty of room to expand and play a role in treating the future estimated 42,000 cancer cases projected for 2020 by the National Cancer Registry.
The proposal to move the facilities of St Luke, including units opened up by Minister Harney as recent at January 2009, to the already overcrowded site at St. James’s Hospital, does not make any sense from a health service perspective. Instead, the proposed vacation of the St Luke’s site leads one to the conclusion that it has more to do with freeing up some real estate in order that the HSE might sell it off at some advantageous point in the future and plug their budgetary crisis brought about by this right wing government.
I support the efforts of patients and their relatives, who had no input into this decision, in their efforts together with the St Luke’s Hospital campaign to keep the hospital at the present site and for its services to be properly maintained.
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