Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 18 September 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Update on the CervicalCheck Screening Programme: Discussion

Dr. Peter McKenna:

The colposcopy waiting time has been addressed locally by people putting on extra clinics. There are now three or four a week where previously there were two or three. That is what they can do quite easily.; what they cannot do is deal with the number of increased clinical referrals. The expectation, as I stated earlier, is that we will be planning to take those out of the colposcopy clinics and let them deal with abnormal cytology and positive HPV. If we can reduce that number of referrals by what we know to be 30% to 40% of the colposcopy workload, the HPV work generated can be accommodated relatively easily.