Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 3 April 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

CervicalCheck Screening Programme Update: Discussion (Resumed)

Mr. Damien McCallion:

It has, and it is more advanced in many ways. It has had screening for a lot longer than we and many other countries have. We work closely with Australia. There are two objectives: to try to find capacity to deal with the backlog and to try to identify laboratories that might work with us on HPV primary screening. There are big challenges when a company looks into Ireland at the moment and we have to make sure we can attract people to work with us. That is a risk we have to manage around this. There is not a normal tendering environment around HPV primary screening. I will ask Dr. Doherty to answer the timeline question.