Dr. Karin Denton:

The direct answer to the question about the 221 women is that we were not able to look into them in any more detail. We found some documentation about the CervicalCheck executive management team's response to some of the earlier findings of the audit in 2015, when it wrote to one of the laboratory providers with queries about recurring patterns which seemed to have been detected. We covered this in our report but, again, it was not followed through on. They said it would be followed through in the QA visit but that did not happen. There was some attempt to look at some of the 221 women but there was no collation or pulling together of audit results. In this respect there was nothing for us to look at or try to break down.

The review of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists will be helpful, although it may well be that a number of women will not give their consent to participate, thus limiting its findings.