Mr. Damien McCallion:

Yes. They can vary a little week to week based on demand or because the system is so sensitive at present that if one or two staff are on leave that can affect it. We have got additional resources into those laboratories and we are working on a solution with the third laboratory, MedLab Pathology, which is up at 33 weeks. Clearly, that is a major concern and it has deteriorated. Notwithstanding that the clinical advice on this is that it still presents a low risk, as I mentioned in my opening statement, from the experience of this crisis this is very worrying for women. We see it coming through on our information line. I met the staff who work on the information line last Thursday and, understandably, there is a great deal of anxiety about it.

Our focus is on trying to put in place some of the solutions we have identified over the last number of months to get capacity. I mentioned in the opening statement that we have had to trawl the world, from Australia to America to Europe, to try to find capacity. We also have to take that on in a way, given the experience from Dr. Scally's report, that we go through a full quality assurance process for any laboratory that we connect into the system. We are also developing a public laboratory at the Coombe. There is a commitment to that and we received funding this year to do it. We have set up a couple of project teams. One is to build the laboratory - there is a construction project involved - and one is to staff it.

We have limited medical manpower in cytopathology in this country, which is an issue for us. We must grow the medical workforce and the screening workforce. Getting screeners is very difficult when a country moves to HPV primary screening. The UK is under massive pressure with backlogs as well. Part of the reason in the UK is that as it switches laboratories over and consolidates from the old testing model to the new one, the requirement for cytology reduces so people who have made careers in that are leaving. That presents challenges. We are trying to pick up some of those people from the UK and to come up with all sorts of propositions to get them to come and work here, even temporarily, to help alleviate and reduce the time. At present, we are in the middle of quite complex negotiations which I do not wish to compromise. Some of them are going on as we speak today and were taking place over the last week or two to nail this down, but I am more optimistic than I would have been when we were last before the committee about getting extra capacity on board that will help to address it.

In the longer term, our aim would be to rebalance the current model where we have approximately 9% in the public system and 81% in the private system. The commitment to build the laboratory at the Coombe will help that, but it will take time. In the short term we must avail of capacity in other jurisdictions to help get us out of the problem we are in at present and to ensure women get the results.