Dr. Helen Lambkin:

I would like to make a statement on one of those issues. I work in the Dublin Institute of Technology as a lecturer. Dr. Euphemia McGoogan's report was published in 2004 in which she reviewed the ICSP phase 1 and made recommendations for the expansion to the full national programme. In her report she made a statement about laboratory capacity. She said that five major laboratories were screening sufficient numbers of smears at the time for quality assurance in practice and that, with appropriate funding and training, there would be sufficient capacity to provide the full service provided they all moved to liquid based cytology, LBC, which was a different way of taking the cervical sample into a liquid so that it could be prepared in a mono layer. This was much quicker and easier to read than the previous smears and it also reduced many of the repeat smears that were a problem up to that time.

There was another ICSP report in 2006 prepared by Dr. Marian O'Reilly which examined the way in which capacity could be expanded through training of further medical scientists in the field of cervical cytology. When the report was produced, the Dublin Institute of Technology was approached. We set up a degree, with support and financial input from the ICSP, to train a further 50 medical scientists for cervical cytology. We took in students in 2006, 2007 and 2008 and we were in the process of completing their training to expand the numbers, approximately ten per year, when we had to discontinue that programme because the outsourcing meant there would be no opportunities for those students either to train or to be employed, so capacity was not an issue. Those were the matters on which I wanted to comment.