Mr. Damien McCallion:

We know now that some of them did not have cervical cancer. CervicalCheck carried out an audit. It took early notifications from hospitals of diagnoses of cervical cancer. We know that two cases ultimately did not involve cancer, which is clearly good for those patients. We know of at least two other cases whereby the patients involved did not have cervical cancer but had another form of cancer. The audit took the notification from the hospitals and carried out the comparison in the context of cytology, which is where we ended up with the difference between the original interpretation and the subsequent interpretation of the results. The process of disclosing to patients fell down later.

The second issue that emerged was that details of some cases were not notified directly to the cervical screening service but were notified to the cancer registry and were not included in the original audit. The purpose of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists review is to look at all 3,100 women who were diagnosed with cervical cancer. That is reducing in terms of approximately 1,800 people who would have had a screening history and also had cervical cancer. They will form part of that review which will give us the answers to some of the outstanding questions on that.