Professor Sean Daly:

One needs to backfill those posts, obviously. The situation in Cork is that they have been unable to provide ultrasound for every woman. They have had to use some kind of metric to decide who gets a scan. That is dreadful. The purpose of the scan is not to diagnose Down's syndrome. If one wants to diagnose Down's syndrome, it is an early screen because only about half of Down's syndrome cases will be diagnosed on the early scan. It is really about structural abnormalities like spina bifida and gastroschisis. They do not increase as a woman gets older. Using a cut-off of 35 or 40 is not relevant if one is thinking about structural abnormalities. We want to diagnose major congenital heart disease, spina bifida, gastroschisis and anterior abdominal wall defects in order to optimise things for that baby once it is born. One does not want a baby born with no left ventricle in Letterkenny at 3 a.m. on the Sunday morning of a bank holiday weekend. By the time that child gets to Crumlin, it will be significantly compromised. That is the difficulty.