Dr. Gabriel Scally:

My comment was about what happens when things go wrong. I recall that on the day I was appointed I made the point that when things go wrong people generally want three things: they want to know the truth about what went on; they want to know that it will not happen to anyone else; and they would really like someone who was responsible and involved to say sorry to them. All of the evidence shows that achieving those three things can resolve a huge number of the concerns of the patients involved. My experience in dealing with the CervicalCheck problem is that people are often resorting to legal action because they cannot get any answers any other way. I think that is a terrible pity. It should not be like that. I am not convinced that, having gone through a legal action, it necessarily gets a person to the truth either because judges are in a very difficult position in that they can only make a judgment on the basis of the evidence that is placed before them. They cannot have an investigatory element to their work and so they have to decide a case for or against. I do not think this necessarily brings closure for people. I know from talking to the women and the relatives that they are interested in knowing what went wrong and why it went wrong, and they would really like someone to say sorry, particularly to the women who were so badly treated in the open disclosure. They would like an apology, not in a letter from someone they have never heard of high up in the organisation but from the people who did not treat them properly. I think those are all reasonable things. Our current system does not, it seems to me, provide an opportunity for that sort of process to happen.