Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 8 November 2018

Public Accounts Committee

Matters related to Medical Negligence, Open Disclosure, Cervical Cancer and Thalidomide Litigation

9:00 am

Mr. Damien McCallion:

We secured extra resources for HPV testing from the United Kingdom and other places to try to ensure we would minimise the risk. There is still an overlap with some of the people involved in managing the backlog in the current system also involved in the HPV testing project.

There is still an overlap in that some of the people that are involved in managing the backlog and the current system are also involved in the HPV project. We have tried to minimise that by taking in additional people. We have taken someone into our project office who has cervical screening experience in the UK. We established a project management office to try to manage and secure the HPV project. I mentioned the previous time we were here that we have had challenges in securing some of the clinical resource to advance the HPV project as well. We are starting to make some inroads into getting some of that resource in place. We have recruited a new clinical director for the cervical screening programme and we are also trying to bring in someone to lead on the cytopathology or laboratory side, which would have been one of Dr. Scally's recommendations. We had commenced that process prior to Dr. Scally's report. There is some overlap and we are trying to minimise it.