Michael Harty (Clare, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I have to go to the Chamber in a few minutes, but I would like to ask a question before I call Senator Burke. It arose out of evidence that we received last night, but it is something that has been on our minds as we have assessed this over the past 18 months. I refer to the balance of risk in relation to screening programmes. We understand that there is an inherent high rate of missing early changes of cervical cancer, pre-cancerous changes, and we understand that this is a problem with most screening programmes. As Dr. Henry said, 15 out of 20 will be picked up, but five will not. When one goes through the balancing of risk of a screening programme, there are instances where one looks at a slide and there is no evidence of pre-cancerous changes, even though there may be but they have not been picked up on the slide, there are instances where changes are not picked up but are evident and there are instances where major changes are not picked up.

As one moves through that gradiation, is there now a rebalancing of the risk? The witnesses last night felt that there are inherent deficiencies in screening, but CervicalCheck was outside those inherent risks. In other words, the programme was deficient. Is that rebalancing down to the limitations of screening, and ensuring that the programme is not adding a greater risk because it is in some way deficient? Is that being rebalanced at the moment? Is the programme now running at a rate efficient to the maximum of the limitations of screening?

When we invite healthy people in to have a service, for instance, screening, should there not be a no-fault compensation scheme for people damaged by the failures of the system? Might that encourage more people to come forward, because 20% of women are not being screened, for whatever reason. It may not be because they do not have confidence in the screening but rather because they just do not engage. If there was a no-fault compensation scheme in place, would that alleviate a lot of the anxiety that has developed over the last 18 months? Perhaps the three main witnesses this could comment on that.