Mr. Damien McCallion:

I will take the first question. In terms of the response, I acknowledge the scale of what has happened and of trying to put a cohesive response in place. The screening programme is a relatively small service. CervicalCheck has just over 30 staff, which includes managing and running the service day to day. The helpline was effectively inundated in those first number of days with a very low response rate. To date, there have been over 17,800 calls as of our report last night. A total of 14,290 of those have been responded to. This still leaves a very significant number. As I think I explained at one committee meeting last week, I do not want to go over old ground but in simple terms, we set up four call centres to try to deal with this. One is in Cork, which takes the initial calls. Typically, it is able to handle 25% to 30% of the calls at the first point of contact from the women who are concerned. All of the others are requesting callback from a clinician. That is one of the key issues for us at the moment in terms of making enough clinical staff available to deal with the responses. We triage those calls into a number of categories. One is where a woman has a normal smear history so the call is taken to Limerick where the centre is based and they go on to the system to pull down the information for that woman so it is not actually just a phone call and a conversation. It involves looking at their full clinical history so that we can then determine who is best placed to talk to that woman about the concerns she expressed. If the woman has a normal smear history, our call centre in Waterford or public health take that call. If there is an abnormal smear history, there are two centres in Dublin and Limerick, which we try to resource to take those calls. The final category are people who have had a cancer history or colposcopy. We have put a model in place for the hospitals where the women contact them directly. It is fair to say that there is significant stress and strain in that model. Obviously, we had to put it in very quickly. We brought in some expertise around call centre management but it is after the act. One would certainly not be doing this in the normal course of events.

In respect of the case mentioned by the Senator-----