Richard Boyd Barrett (Dún Laoghaire, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

One factor suggested for the inferior detection rate and the quality of the screening was that readers in the United States were reading 80 to 90 tests daily, whereas the NHS had a maximum of 50 that readers were allowed to examine. Here in Ireland the figure was more like 30 to 35 slides. I would have thought that if a reader is looking at 90 slides each day, the possibility of making mistakes is considerably higher than if he or she is doing 30 to 35 or a maximum of 50. That was one of their concerns. Will the witnesses tell us if that continued to be the case after the contract for the screening programme was established?

Is the 1.66 rate that the witnesses mentioned, which is still lower than 1.8, across the results from both the Irish and American tests? We were told that 50% are still being done in Ireland and 50% are being done in the US. When the witnesses give the figure of 1.66, is that the aggregate of both the Irish and American tests? If it is, that does not tell us specifically what detection rate is coming from the American laboratories.