I would like to use my time to suggest a way to improve cancer care outcomes in counties Carlow and Kilkenny. In figures given to me by the Irish cancer Society, excluding non-melanoma skin cancer, in 2024, 47% of Carlow people diagnosed with cancer died from the disease. In the same year, 47% of Kilkenny people diagnosed with cancer died from the disease. We have made significant progress in improving survival rates and expanding access to cancer care. I pay tribute to the men and women who support oncology patients as well as volunteers in the likes of Éist in Carlow and Cois Nore in Kilkenny among other services available in my constituency. However, 365 men, women and children from Carlow and Kilkenny died from cancer in 2024.
That is almost one person per day. As somebody elected to represent these people and their families, I find this quite upsetting. This is why today I want to make the case for a decisive and necessary step in Ireland's fight against cancer. This is the introduction of next generation sequencing, NGS, testing as a core part of cancer diagnostic and treatment services.
While traditional NGS relies on tissue biopsies, blood-based NGS is a critical tool in modern oncology. In other words, it is a simple blood test that is capable of detecting more than 50 types of cancers simultaneously. To quote a medical consultant I spoke with recently, a publicly available blood tests to detect multiple cancers simultaneously and to detect inherited cancer risks will be a game changer for cancer care in Ireland. This game changer will only happen if we choose to integrate NGS fully in our public health service. This blood test would allow us to reduce delays, improve accuracy, provide equitable access to patients regardless of geography and guide targeted therapies that depend on understanding the genetic profile of tumours. This is precisely the sort of early detection and precision medicine our national cancer strategy envisaged when it set out its outcome goals of detecting cancer earlier, reducing inequalities and improving patient outcomes.
In 2022 the HSE launched Ireland's national strategy for accelerating genetic and genomic medicine, which sets out a clear vision for bringing genomics into routine care. This strategy emphasises improved disease prevention, better diagnostics and more targeted treatments for patients and families across the country. To deliver this vision the HSE then established the national genetics and genomics office in 2023 to build national capacity for genomic testing and to ensure Ireland can retain and expand accredited testing. We can see that a lot of the ground work has been done but to deliver fully on the promise of genomic medicine we must now make NGS the standard platform for cancer testing.
