Dr. Lorraine Doherty:

We will not be taking a decision to stop new entrants to the screening programme. It is important that women who are what I call "screening-naive", who have never been screened before and who are eligible for screening can access a test. We do not know their exact status, but once they are in the programme we have a better idea of how they are doing.

As Mr. McCallion said, we need to look at how we are going to address the backlog and capacity issues before we can ever consider taking decisions like those we described.