Over 40 high-risk women will be offered preventative cancer surgery annually in Ireland’s first cancer prevention centre, the Medical Independent (MI) has been informed.
Launched in Cork in September, the new theatre centre at South Infirmary Victoria University Hospital (SIVUH), in collaboration with colleagues at Cork University Hospital, aims to prevent people from ever developing cancer.
According to Prof Mark Corrigan, Consultant Breast Surgeon with a special interest in preventative surgical oncology, the centre is a protected theatre resource dedicated to cancer prevention surgery for people at high-risk of developing cancer, specifically breast and ovarian cancer.
It is among only a few such established centres in Europe, with other centres located in the UK, France, and the Netherlands.
The theatre at SIVUH is currently available once every two weeks for an extended day.
“That means we can get one to two cases done per day depending on the type of surgery being performed,” Prof Corrigan told MI.
Genetic, psychology, and surgical counselling and support services are provided to women undergoing preventative surgery.
With an ageing and increasing population, Prof Corrigan argued that prevention must be prioritised to help reduce future demand.
“For example, if you look at cancer, we diagnosed 45,000 cancers in Ireland last year,” he said.
“A lot of the figures and modelling suggest that by 2045, we’re looking at diagnosing up to 90,000 cancers a year. That means if we were to continue to deliver as good a service as what we’re doing now, we would have to double our footprint in terms of infrastructure and staffing in the next 20 years. If we were going to do that they would have had to have started by now.
“It means that in 20 years’ time, if we don’t start looking at how we decrease demand for health services now, rather than just chasing capacity all the time, then we’re going to have a real problem. This is something we’re seeing across the world.”
Prof Corrigan outlined that modelling undertaken suggests that “if we were to operate on 450 people, we could statistically prevent about 313 cancers from happening and the cost saving from that to the Exchequer is about €69 million. It’s huge.”
The initial annual target is to offer surgery to 45 women per year, taking into account that some of the operations could last 10 hours, involve reconstruction, and are highly complex.
“People don’t often look on surgery as prevention. But from a cancer point of view, a lot of the work we do as surgical oncologists is in cancer prevention, whether that’s getting rid of lesions that are pre-malignant or secondary prevention in terms of screening services.”
According to the HSE, up to four in 10 cancers are preventable and one in two people living in Ireland will have a cancer diagnosis in their lifetime. Read the full interview with Prof Corrigan in a future issue of MI.
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