Dr. Lorraine Doherty:

I can update the committee on the IT issue which arose in relation to the Quest laboratory in Chantilly. An issue arose in February of this year when the laboratory had taken on an additional workload for the HSE and was trying to issue results in the normal way to our IT system. If a result comes into our IT system, the woman who has had the test is automatically notified that her GP has her result and her GP receives her result. When the IT system in Chantilly was unable to interface with the CervicalCheck system, they used a manual system for issuing results to the GPs. However, because the results were being issued manually, they did not come into our system electronically, and so our system did not generate letters to the women. We wrote to GPs in April, when the manual system was finalised, to tell them they would be receiving the results manually and that they should inform their patients. We did not write to all the women in the programme at that time because we did not know exactly who was coming or who had been screened. We had not communicated with the women and we have learned from that. Though we had a temporary arrangement in place and communicated with the health professionals on the issue while trying to resolve the IT glitch, we did not communicate with the women. I take the Deputy's point. That is a lesson for us and it has been picked up in the MacCraith report.

The IT system upgrade took longer than we expected and it affected this large group of women. However, I can assure the committee that the IT issue has been resolved. The results are now coming electronically into CervicalCheck and the system is working in the normal way, in that the GP gets the result and the woman gets a letter to tell her she has received her result. We have categorised all the women who have been involved or affected in any way by this IT glitch into different groups based on the action we needed to take, and all of them have been contacted. There is a small group of women who are working with their clinicians and whose clinicians had been in contact with them about some of the test results. The IT issue has been resolved, the system is now functioning normally, and everybody who had been affected by this over the last number of months has had a communication from CervicalCheck.