Ms Celeste O'Callaghan:

Without talking too much about an individual patient's communications, this lady contacted the Department in early April with concerns about the delay in her smear test results. As my colleague has said, that was not an unusual letter for us to receive because turnaround times have been long. Our initial judgement was that that was the issue that arose for this woman. We wrote back to her to explain what was causing the delay in the hope that would provide some reassurance.

She came back to the Department with further concerns, and when it became apparent the delay could not be explained by the normal turnaround times that applied at the time, we sought her details to follow up on the case with CervicalCheck. We had quite a number of communications with her in the course of that being assessed until, I believe, 25 June when CervicalCheck responded to us to say there had been an IT issue and, as a result, the woman's results had not been issued. We sought further detail on the IT issue, its implications, and the number of other people who may have been affected.