NEW FINDINGS from the National Cancer Registry show the Mid-West has the lowest survival rate for cancer.
Covering the period from 2020 to 2022, the report examines cancer incidence and survival rates across the country. It looks at the four most common forms of the disease in Ireland: lung, bowel, breast and prostate cancers. In the timeframe covered by the study, an average of 44,000 tumours were diagnosed each year.
As per the research, the Mid-West has the lowest survival rate for cancer compared with the national average. It’s lower for four common cancers compared to five other health regions. The largest disparity was found with survival rates for colorectal cancer, lung cancer and breast cancer, while outcomes were also worse for prostate cancer.
Quality of health services in the Mid-West have been flagged since the 2009 downgrading of Ennis Hospital to a model two hospital and instead of the promised centre of excellence at University Hospital Limerick (UHL) it has continually struggled with overcrowding and patients on trolleys.
Six health regions are were examined in the study, Dublin and Northeast, Dublin and Midlands, Dublin and South East, Mid-West, South West, West and North West. The survival rate for colorectal cancer in the Mid-West was 59.4 percent. This was 4.1 percent lower than the national survival rate of 63.5 percent. The report also noted that the other five health regions had a “similar survival rate”, with the Mid-West the outlier.
For lung cancer, the net survival was 20.8% for cases diagnosed during 2009-2018 in Ireland. However, that number drops again for the Mid-West region which has a survival rate of 16.1 percent for lung cancer patients.
For female breast cancer in Ireland overall, the net survival rate was 85 percent – but it falls back by five percent for the Mid-West (80 percent). The other common cancer examined was prostate cancer which showed nine-in-ten patients survived across the nine-year period used in the study. The national figure was 92.5% but this dropped slightly for the Dublin and North-East region (90.6 percent) and the Mid-West (90.4).
