Mr. Damien McCallion:

On the slides, I mentioned last week that in some cases, there was an unacceptable delay for some people. The outermost delay was 76 days and the average was 22 days. That is not acceptable. We had subsequent requests for slides on Friday, Monday and Tuesday of this week, which comprise a further 30 or so requests. We have written to the laboratories stating we expect them to be able to turn these around in less than ten working days at a maximum. They must take the image and they must get all the logistics sorted out, including adhering to the protocol. A number of requests came in on Friday, Monday and Tuesday and that may have related to concerns of a number of individual women or families. Our objective now it to ensure the laboratories achieve that within the target.

On some of the members' other points, last week we discussed how we might triage and prioritise given the backlog. We have managed to prioritise the colposcopies because of the nature of the way the cases are identified. As I said to the committee last week, it is much more complex and is proving difficult to differentiate between out-of-cycle and in-cycle tests. If we could do that within the in-cycle, it would be a much better way to do it.