Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 16 May 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

CervicalCheck Screening Programme: Discussion

9:00 am

Dr. Tony Holohan:

That is correct. There is still another 20% we would like to get to. The uptake rate is about 80%, which is good, but we still have the message of wanting to have women come back into a programme they can trust. That has turned around a rising incidence of cervical cancer that we had in 2008 into one that is falling now at about 7% per year. That is a significant contribution that will be made to mortality and survival.

If I am not wasting the Deputy's question time, I want to comment on the reference to NICE and to point out some of the kinds of learnings we have. We have more of the architecture now than we might have ever had before in terms of implementation. Legislatively, there has been the patient safety Bill I mentioned earlier, giving the Minister guidelines to set capacity. We also have a ministerially-appointed committee, chaired by Dr. Karen Ryan, a palliative care consultant, with a broad range of consultants called the national clinical effectiveness committee that, essentially, oversees the endorsement of national guidelines, early warning scores and so on, with which the Deputy might be familiar, as well as clinical audit. The first clinical audit that was endorsed through that mechanism was the trauma audit last year, which directly informed the trauma strategy that was approved by Government as a consequence. That is the kind of structured approach to audit that we have and which will give us the kind of machinery, if I can put it in those terms, to enable verifiable implementation of some of the learnings we will have from all of this.

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