Ms Michele Tait:

I thank the Deputy for a question. I agree and referred to this point earlier. As part of the scoping inquiry, Dr. Scally made a number of recommendations on the information we give to women and service users of the programme. One of the outputs from the work that he did was that we undertook a complete overhaul of all the information we provide to women and to other service users. I have the old leaflet and letter that we provided previously to patients with information about the screening programme. We now have a suite of information that patients get, depending on where that patient is, or if they are a healthcare provider and so on. All of that was done in consultation with patients who were affected directly by the issues that arose in 2018, and a wider pool of patients with whom we work closely on all of this.

The range of materials that we have produced are incredibly clear and unambiguous and they provide information to women in a way that identifies the limitations of screening. Nobody fully understood that. Looking at the "before" and "after" products, there is no comparison between the information sources. Online resources have been vastly improved. I mentioned earlier that since we put the new information online in September-October of last year, there has been 165,000 or more visits to that website. Feedback from patients we have received has been positive. This is something that we keep under review. This is not something that we have just done as a once-off exercise.

In the context of all the recommendations made by Dr. Scally in his report, this is significant work that is taking place, alongside everything else that we are trying to manage and all the challenges that my colleagues have described. We have to start looking to the future with all of this. A great volume of work has been done by us on the information leaflets to address the deficits that were in the type and volume of information we were giving to people, and much other work is under way as well. All of this information is readily available on our website. Women will get information when they are called for screening.

They will be given different information when they attend for their screening test. It is really good information. Part of the work we have done in recent months has been to engage significantly with Dr. Scally and his team in reviewing all of the information. He has given us some good feedback as to how we can make improvements. This is something we keep under review. We have already vastly improved the information we provide to women.