Cancer Services
Dail Éireann — 2025-06-26
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Pádraig Rice (SD), Cork South-Central

Access to symptomatic breast disease clinics has become a postcode lottery. Following an urgent GP referral, a person should be seen by a clinic within two weeks. However, timely access to these clinics varies widely. Last year, only four out of nine hospitals met the target of seeing 95% of urgent referrals within two weeks. The other five failed. The Mater Hospital only reached 29%, St. James's Hospital 51% and Letterkenny 58%. Some of these are shocking failures. It should not matter where one lives; no person should have to wait more than two weeks. These are urgent referrals. Where is the sense of urgency?

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Source: Houses of the Oireachtas. Licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/). The Official Report is revised after first publication; the fetch timestamp below identifies the version quoted.

Record URI: https://data.oireachtas.ie/akn/ie/debateRecord/dail/2025-06-26/debate/main
Retrieved: 2026-08-27T06:54:45+00:00
Sitting date: 2025-06-26