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THERE ARE CONCERNS for cancer patients after it was confirmed that hospitals have been left short of chemotherapy drugs.
Dosages of chemotherapy are individually prescribed for each patient but up to 12 hospitals have been left short as Baxter Healthcare has failed to deliver a full supply for Ireland over the past two weeks.
The pharmaceutical company is the only firm supplying the compound drugs to public and private hospitals in Ireland.
Donal Buggy, Head of Services and Advocacy at the Irish Cancer Society said:
Cancer patients should not be paying the price because of a lack of planning for an occurrence like this. People with cancer need to be reassured that no matter what happens externally, their treatment will not be affected.
The ICS wants to see contingency plans put in place by all cancer-treatment suppliers so that if their supply is interrupted, patients will not be affected.
In a statement to TheJournal.ie the pharmaceutical company said, “Baxter is currently experiencing a temporary supply constraint of compounded chemotherapy products supplied to a number of public and private hospitals in Ireland.
We are doing all we can to restore production capacity as quickly as possible and minimise the impact to patients. We are working with other Baxter compounding units in the UK to identify if any extra capacity can be utilised, advising hospitals to identify alternative supply arrangements and working diligently to revalidate equipment, which is necessary to resume production.
“We expect to resume production early next week. We would like to sincerely apologise to patients and clinicians for this situation and reiterate our commitment to resolution as soon as possible.”
Contingency plan
The HSE said the vast majority of patients undergoing chemotherapy will not experience any interruption or changes to their treatment plan as a result of this issue.
In a statement it said contingency planning is underway to minimise the impact caused by the reduction in supply.
“Medical teams in each of the hospitals are determining the clinical needs of those patients involved and decisions regarding re-scheduling are being prioritised.
Hospitals are in direct contact with those patients affected to re-schedule appointments as appropriate. For a very small number of patients, whose clinical needs require immediate access to the drugs as planned, treatment options are being offered in alternative hospitals to ensure that they are seen in a timely manner.
The Irish Cancer Society said, “Worrying about how the supply of drugs will affect this treatment, could have a negative impact on patients who may already be experiencing significant distress.”
However it added that it’s pleased the HSE has responded swiftly to this and plans to manage patients’ care have been put in place.
The HSE said that hospitals will make direct contact with patients affected and patients are advised to attend for treatment as arranged unless they are informed otherwise.
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Best description I have read when trying to explain cloud, particularly to non techie senior managers is a very simple one liner.
‘Storing your information on someone else’s computer’
Cloud is a window for the NSA.
Frank, does that mean they have access to all data ?
Noone knows for sure but we have good reason to suspect they do.
Sometimes Frank, among all the crazy talk, you do hit the nail on the head.
Security experts also suspect they have a backdoor to break AES encryption.
More than likely they have a back door to your PC and Smart phone irrespective and without a warrant also any email / internet transaction through a US based server can be spied on by the NSA.. Here’s the timeline for domestic Spying…
It is prudent to assume that EVERYTHING is compromised.
I said AES in my last comment. I meant DES.
check out arxshare, this will be difficult for the NSA ;)
What about Mega.co.nz? You get 50gb free & it uses end to end encryption.
Mega is hardly reliable though is it?
Could go down tomorrow for all we know
Data Protection hate the cloud. You have no guarantee as to where your data is stored and no idea of who has physical access. If you hold any sort of confidential data, do NOT use a public cloud. If it’s only your own photos, music and documents, then go for it.
NAS (Network Attached Storage) is a far cheaper per gb ,and safer alternative.
Basically a hard drive connected to your router so it can be accessed online from anywhere. Should be the next big thing in the consumer tech market
It’s cheaper per gb at first glance only.
When you consider quality and reliability of that access – then it’s not that instant winner anymore.
And security wise – many would argue here. If setup wrongly, nas drive may be childishly easy to break into, while professional cloud services mentioned in the article, while still exposed to some breach have the basics definitely better covered – allow less user error.
Of course if you buy crap you get crap but for relatively low investment you can get great quality.
Reliability again is down to your in segment in broadband – invest well get reliability.
Security-wise I’d rather have my data sitting in a hard drive beside my router rather than in a data centre I have no control of – not who handles my drive.
NAS drive:
- uses your household electricity (I know small, but…), cloud not
- is dependable on your Internet connection, cloud is hosted on mesh of super fast links and basically always ON
- is not great for sharing, cloud is (imagine 10 co-workers downloading large graphics files from your NAS)
- is not providing any data redundancy (if your NAS fails your data is gone – unless you have another solution setup for it), cloud is fully redundant
- cannot easily scale, cloud scale very easily if your demands grow
Security? There is no such thing as privacy in the Internet, connecting own NAS disk does not change anything here. You are still using online banking, Facebook, you are still sending emails with attached CV’s or payslips that are stored on email servers, you are still buying in the Internet… Everywhere you touch you leave trace. Therefore cloud is as secure as anything else to me :)
If your house floods or goes on fire your “cloud” storage hasn’t worked at all. Off site backup is key and NAS at home is a crap option unless your get some enjoyment from making things harder then they need to be.
Protip: for people who need large amounts of storage or are concerned about it being spied on, go onto dabs.ie.
Look up western digital my cloud.
1tb own personal cloud you can access anywhere, if I remember right it’s the bones of 100 quid.
Easy set up and no worries.
Also, it’s a physical thing you connect to your own network at home via Ethernet cable, it’s not an online service.
If you’ve got a VPN as well, about as secure as possible.
It’s not a cloud. Its a server.
I’m aware it’s a NAS server but let’s try to keep it simple here.
1. Worry – what if you are burgled and they take the NAS?
Jamie, what kind of authentication and encryption are you using for that?
“Copy” is another cloud based storage app. 35GB’s of space.
Dropbox is the best by far.
I didn’t see any mention of the fact that providers use bots to read your data in order to direct advertising at you. I wouldn’t put anything in the cloud without first applying 128 bit AES encryption.
Dropbox is the best, and very easy to use with a nice interface
Just set your libraries to sync to OneDrive and forget it. It’s solid in all areas and the Office online apps are useful in a pinch.
Simplicity is key.
Logmein’s “Cubby” is brilliant if you need access to clients files. You can create a directory for each client and lock it down with a unique password. It can be setup so each client can only see they’re directory. You get 5gb free, plus it has an app for iOS & Android. I’m paying €45 a year for 1tb of data. Also, If you accidentally delete files, you can recover them anytime and from anywhere. I tried a few cloud systems and most had problems with security and access.
Flickr has an allowance of 1000 gb free.
“That said, each service offers encryption to make sure your data is safe but on the users’ end, the best thing to do is to create a strong password”
I very much disagree with this. Security and privacy must be the main argument for choosing a cloud storage solution, and although they all offer encryption, all mentioned services encrypt on the server, and therefore are not secure and see transport the user’s data in plain text.
There is a trend towards client-side encryption (or end-to-end encryption) and self-hosted clouds. Companies that want to secure their intellectual property should consider solutions like Owncloud or Arxshare http://www.arxshare.com.
wuala.com
- As best I recall, all servers are in Europe.
- Uses ‘Client side’ encryption.
- Can sync easy with your chosen PC folders.
- Mobile apps.
- Only 5gb free.
have your say