Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

This is a central point. We hear the term "false negatives" being thrown around but there is also incompetence, pure and simple, where a slide has not been read correctly. As Vicky Phelan stated yesterday, given that cancer was prevalent in one of her slides, one could conclude the slide was not even read. That is how concerned she was. How are we getting on top of the limitation in respect of the test, in other words, false negatives? If more than one woman has more than one false negative slide for serious, high-grade instances, I cannot get my head around how the HSE did not see red lights flashing. It is basic statistics.