Alan Kelly (Tipperary, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I will jump in with a few questions here. I will not be long. I appreciate that HSE colleagues here have only just seen this and we do not know if the Department of Health had a copy of this at the time, albeit we will find out in the coming days. There are three versions. Without putting words in his mouth, the Secretary General said it was likely it was sent on. What jumps out most to me from what we have just read is on page 2 of the memo. It continued on the previous version. It refers, using inverted commas, to "a communications protocol" prepared for consulting clinicians to address their questions. It says the spokesman on matters related to this audit was Dr. Gráinne Flannelly, clinical director of the CervicalCheck programme, who we know has now moved on.

Unless I was chairing a different meeting, I understood earlier from the director general of the HSE that the communications he took to be in the memo and the programme of communications work was obviously with the patients first through the clinicians. This is not how that reads. Anybody reading that can see it does not use the word "patient" anywhere. It says a communications protocol has been prepared for consultant clinicians to address their questions. What about the questions of the women?

The spokesperson on matters related to the audit was named as Dr. Gráinne Flannelly, clinical director of the CervicalCheck programme. I say to all of those here that this should not give comfort that there is a communications process in place with the people that matter the most, namely, the women. It does not. It says, more or less, that there will be a protocol in place to ensure the clinicians are being told.

This is almost as if within the politics of health, it was intended to ensure that there was a protocol to tell the clinicians what was going on here and to name the spokesperson. If that is the memo written by John Gleeson on behalf of Stephanie O'Keeffe and sent to the director general, is it any wonder that the women affected were not told for years in some cases? Is it any wonder? This memo has nothing to do with communications to the patients. It only goes down as far as the clinicians. That is the most devastating part of this. It actualises what we have all been thinking and talking about for the last week and a half. That one paragraph is a communications process being put in place from the HSE through the screening programme for clinicians, not the affected women. It sums up where we are today. That is at the bedrock of where this issue lies.

The women were not being thought of. Nowhere in this memo does it say it is necessary to put in place a programme to communicate with all of the women and to ensure that they are all communicated with properly and dealt with in a compassionate way. It does not say that. It says there is a protocol in place for consulting clinicians and it names the spokesperson. Does that not say a great deal about the politics of health in Ireland and the way in which the ultimate end users, the patients affected and the women whose lives have been destroyed, were treated? It is a devastating paragraph in the letter and it is not a paragraph anybody could read to give comfort that the communications process down to the patients was going to happen.

On page 1, it states that all international screening programmes will have encountered a media headline that "screening did not diagnose my cancer". It states that the CervicalCheck programme has prepared communications material to ensure transparent, effective and robust communications processes are in place to provide clear information for the media and the public, where appropriate, on the CervicalCheck clinical audit process and results. A small issue jumps out again; the patient. It says "all international screening programmes will have encountered a media headline that "screening did not diagnose my cancer". It says the CervicalCheck programme has prepared communications material to ensure transparent, effective and robust communications processes are in place to provide clear information. To whom? Not the women affected, but to the media and the public. Transparent, effective and robust communications processes are referred to, not for the women affected but for the media and the public.

That says it all and it is quite damning. It is not what I was expecting to read given the evidence I heard this morning.