Professor Fidelma Flanagan:

In 2020, in the period before the Covid crisis and in the course of our recovery after the crisis, we screened more than 56,000 women.

In the first eight months of this year, we screened over 70,000 women. It is good news. Even in September, we screened 15,000 women, which was right back to where we were in the pre-pandemic period. That was a significant effort while we are still in the middle of a pandemic. We have made adaptations to our screening programme. We have made a lot of changes in the past 18 months to maximise the efficiency of screening and improve the experience. We are dealing with a high-risk population. These are women between the ages of 50 and 70. What we cannot do is bring healthy women into a screening programme and expose them to the risk of Covid.