Mr. Damien McCallion:

Our role is simply to facilitate it and that still involves a substantial amount of work. We have a large team providing support through the consent process, the call centre and so on. My understanding is that its aim is still to finish within the six-month target. Regarding the slides, I think more than 60% have now moved to the RCOG in Bristol in the UK. With respect to further slides, they are all scheduled to move to completion within a matter of three to four weeks, and the RCOG is in that process. We have weekly calls with the RCOG. We are trying to plan ahead for the end point when it finishes its work because there will be a disclosure process and a process to feed back the report's findings at the end, which the HSE will have to support as well, and we have commenced that.

We made a commitment to develop the public laboratory at the Coombe Hospital, and we are grateful to the hospital and its board for working with us on that. The Coombe undertakes about 9% of the programme's work. There is a significant development task in terms of staffing to develop medical consultants who have the specialties that we need. There are 1.5 whole-time equivalents in the system and we need to build resilience into the system around that. The Coombe has been very supportive of the programme and has provided a great deal of advice and support to us on how to deal with many of the issues we face in it.

The other element is the infrastructure. We have made an initial allocation of funding for the development of a national cervical screening laboratory and we are going through the design process. While I do not have a detailed plan, we are using the fast-track modular build model to get there as quickly as we can and, hence, as I said in my opening statement, between the workforce side and the capital side I anticipate it will take us certainly up to two years to get there. The implication of that with respect to our HPV primary screening is that we will need to run a tender to ensure we get a partner to work with us both to maintain the programme as it is today and to deliver HPV primary screening as quickly as possible. My colleague, Dr. Doherty, can speak to that if Senator would like.