Minister for Health Mary Harney has said she does not accept that the Government's plan to provide a complete network of radiotherapy services for cancer patients across the State cannot be delivered as planned by 2011.
Moreover, she rejected outright the view expressed by head of the Health Service Executive (HSE) Prof Brendan Drumm on Monday that facilities could be provided faster if they were not funded, as is planned, through public-private partnership (PPP). This was not the case, Ms Harney said. She was responding to news that a review of the project found the rollout of the network, which she announced in 2005, cannot be completed before 2015.
"I don't accept that the public sector cannot in six years provide the radiotherapy facilities that we need. That is just not acceptable to me," she said.
"I am later this week convening a meeting between HSE officials and my own officials and it's not acceptable to me that we won't meet these deadlines. They were very realistic deadlines; a six-year deadline to put in place a national radiotherapy service around the country is not arduous in my opinion."
The plan to provide the facilities by way of PPP would see the private sector build and equip the radiotherapy centres and the public sector leasing capacity from them and staffing them.
Ms Harney said the facilities were being provided by way of PPP "because that's the quickest way, and it's also the best way of getting the resources, but we cannot say because it's being by that way that that will take longer than if it was done the traditional way, which is what some people are trying to argue. I don't accept that".
Prof Drumm told a press briefing in Dublin on Monday there was no doubt that PPP was a more difficult way to deliver anything, but on the plus side it generated the funds for the project. He also said the facilities could be provided faster if funded in the conventional way.
Ms Harney said co-located hospitals were being built by the private sector and progress was being made on that plan. "I don't see why similar progress can't be made in this area," she said.