Dr. Stephanie O'Keeffe:

A clinical audit of invasive cervical cancer is the last in a suite of tools to ensure a programme is working well. If somebody invites me, as national director, specifically to discuss this I am immediately interested in the findings of the audit. I want to know if there is anything in the audit that will present a problem for the women in the programme. At that meeting, the CervicalCheck programme wanted to ensure that the information it felt would be of benefit to patients could be disclosed to those patients. They had worked through a methodology in consultation with a range of stakeholders and they wanted me to resolve the specific problem they were encountering, which was that several laboratories had asked questions about letters they had already sent to consultants at that time.