Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 23 May 2018

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Cancer Screening Programmes: Discussion

9:00 am

Mr. Pat Naughton:

Many of Deputy Kelly's questions might need to be redirected to somebody else in the context of why that did not happen within the HSE.

I want to cross-reference the final point made by Deputy Donnelly. What we do is subjective. The emphasis here must be on pre-cancerous cells. That is the medical scientist who uses his or her knowledge and expertise to subjectively make a call on that. The integrity of the scientist is of paramount importance here. We do not want to mask results by bringing in other areas. We are talking about pre-cancerous cells and the subjective testing of them. I think that is very important to note. We need to focus our data on that.