Mr. Damien McCallion:

I apologise for the language on the procurement side. It referred to the HPV process. With respect to the backlog, Quest Diagnostics and Coombe are both now performing, with turnaround times for women's results of three weeks for Coombe and approximately seven to eight weeks for Quest. That is an improvement from where we were many months ago. We have had challenges in sourcing capacity with MedLab, as the Deputy notes, and we now have options on the table that we have been working through over the past number of weeks. If we get them into play they will help shorten MedLab's turnaround times as well. The process has been complex and I can assure the Deputy that we have been trying to find the capacity.

The Deputy made two points around the recall process. One concerned women in the backlog potentially not getting the recall and I will take that away as I cannot answer the Deputy now on that. I will revert to the Deputy directly on that. On the broader point of moving people on three- and five-year recalls out over a period, we will be moving them into 2020 with respect to the HPV process and moving some of the problem that way. We have two of the labs functioning who cover the middle, the north east, the south east and other parts of the country but the Deputy is correct in saying that in other areas, they do not have such turnaround times. We must address that matter.

We now have capacity and we have been working actively over the past couple of weeks with MedLab to try to see how we can get that into the system. We need to ensure this is done with a full quality assurance process, and we are scheduling visits to the laboratories in order to ensure they meet the quality standard outlined by Dr. Doherty earlier today. If that falls into place, it would allow us to ensure we turn things around in a reasonable period. I do not want to go too deeply into that, if members might forgive me for that. We are in the middle of fairly complex negotiations with the lab to try to get that into the system and ensure we can address the issue as quickly as possible. I assure the Deputy it has been our sole focus for the past four or five months since we renewed the contracts with the provider. The first hurdle was to keep the current providers in the programme or it would have crashed. The second problem was trying to get more capacity from those or other providers in order to ensure we could address the backlog. We have considered that and I am happy to revert to the Deputy separately on that if she so wishes.

I will come back to her about her concerns about people in the backlog as I was not aware of it. I will revert to her directly, particularly on her suggestion that people already in the system should not be getting recalled if they have had their smear out of cycle. Dr. Doherty may wish to comment on one or two other points.