Mr. Gerard O'Mahony:

To meet the current capacity of over 300,000 smears between 30 and 40 well-trained staff are required. There are screening, quality control and retraining elements while unusual cases have to be looked at. Time out is also required; staff need their breaks. If HPV testing was introduced, some 60,000 and 100,000 samples would be generated for cytology, so approximately one third of the 30 or 40 staff required would be needed to meet that demand. We are close enough to those figures at the moment with public laboratories, and we are certainly over it when private laboratories are taken into account. If we went to HPV testing to generate 60,000 to 100,000 samples, and we should be in a position, between private and public sector staff, to be able to deal with that in Ireland. One laboratory is dealing with over 25,000 tests currently, and I believe one private laboratory is dealing with over 130,000, which gives a total of 155,000.