Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

Before I bring in Deputy Brassil for the second round of questions, I would like to ask some of my own.

On Quest Diagnostics now being involved in 90% of screenindg, is that a substantial risk to the service because if anything happens to it, the cervical screening programme will be in serious trouble. How is that risk being managed?

Is Quest Diagnostics involved in HPV testing, in addition to cytology? When doctors received results from MedLab Pathology, not only did they receive the cytology report, they also received a HPV report in conjunction with it. Will the delegates clarify what Quest Diagnostics has been contracted to do? What is the waiting time for samples that go to it? Is it back to four to six weeks or longer than that?

There was a suggestion in the McGrath report that there be a tracking system for smears in order that women would be able to track where their smear was in the system to identify how long it would take for them to get the result. Has that tracking system been put in place?

We have spoken about when HPV screening will start. It will now be the primary test or should be, while the cytology test will, I presume, be a secondary test. That will reduce substantially the load on cytopathology. Will it speed up the repatriation of cytological screening?

It was the audit and interval cancers that brought this controversy to the fore when it became apparent that an audit had been carried out but women had not been informed of the results. Audit is a very important part of quality assurance. There are two elements to the audit. Was a misreading of a smear negligent or was it purely a built-in difficulty in screening, that it is not possible to be 100% accurate in the screening system? Errors are inherent within screening. The High Court judgment on absolute confidence in any cytologist looking at a smear was that if he or she had any doubt whatsoever, he or she would have to apply the absolute confidence principle. Will it be built into any new audit process to be introduced?

To come back to Deputy Kelly's question, to which we did not receive a clear answer, when a new audit process is put in place, will it pick up from where the last audit stopped or will there be a gap in the audit process?