Transport

If you’re undergoing cancer treatment, we can help ease some of the strain of travelling to and from your appointments.

Cancer treatment often involves a good deal of travel for patients. You may already be dealing with the physical and emotional strains of a cancer diagnosis, and if you’re finding it difficult getting to and from your appointments, we have two programmes designed to help you with transport:

• Care to Drive: a transport service for patients
• Travel2Care: a funding for transportation costs

Care to Drive: the transport service for patients

We run a free, volunteer-delivered driving service called Care to Drive that provides transport for cancer patients to and from their hospital treatments. Patients must be attending one of the hospitals participating in the Care to Drive scheme and must be referred by the hospital; you can ask your hospital social worker or nurse for more information.

Participating hospitals (as of January 2012):

• St. Vincent's University Hospital, Elm Park, Dublin 4
• Sligo General Hospital, The Mall, Sligo
• St. James' Hospital, James' Street, Dublin 8
• Letterkenny General Hospital, Letterkenny, Co. Donegal
• Mater Misericordiae University Hospital, Eccles St. Dublin 7

Care to Drive will soon be available in the following hospitals:

• Portiuncula Hospital, Ballinasloe, Co. Galway
• Mid Western Regional Hospital, Dooradoyle, Limerick, Co. Limerick

How to be referred to Care to Drive

1. First, speak to a social worker or nurse in your hospital, who will discuss with you whether the service is suitable for your needs (Care to Drive isn't suitable for everyone).
2. If the hospital refers you, then the Care to Drive team will contact you about your first appointment.
3. You will then contact Care to Drive with your treatment schedule dates (at least 48 hours in advance).
4. We'll ring around our volunteer drivers to see who is available. We can’t guarantee to find a driver for every single appointment but we do guarantee to try our best.
5. Once a driver has agreed to do a drive, they'll contact you the day before the appointment to introduce themselves and confirm directions and pick-up time.
6. At the agreed time and date the driver will arrive at your door to take you to your treatment. This is a door-to-door service (from your door, to the hospital's).
7. You'll have the contact details of the driver for that day, and you'll need to call them 30 minutes before your treatment ends so that they can collect you and returns you to your door.

Changes to your appointment

If your appointment schedule changes, you should let us know as soon as possible. You are responsible for communicating all treatments or schedule changes to us, not the driver. So having a conversation with your driver about any schedule change is not enough.

About our drivers and the Care to Drive service

• All our volunteer drivers are specially trained, reference checked and garda-vetted, before we allow them to take a patient in their car.
• This service is free: we ask for no payment from the patient or any of our partner hospitals.
• Care to Drive is a door-to-door service.
• We meet with the hospital portering services and car parking services to ensure that they are aware of the programme and supportive of it. This ensures smoothness and continuity of service between the volunteer driver, the patient and the hospital staff.

Watch the video about our Care to Drive scheme.

Want to Volunteer as a Care to Drive driver? Find out more and apply.