Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 18 December 2019

Joint Oireachtas Committee on Health

Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists Independent Expert Panel Review into Cervical Screening: Discussion

Mr. Damien McCallion:

The building will be completed within a number of years. That is not really the challenge. The challenge is developing the capacity. We also have to consider resilience. There has to be a level of resilience in the model. Relative to other jurisdictions, we are a small country with regard to the volume for this programme. If we lose people in the future, backlogs may arise for women again, which none of us wants to happen.

We are also looking at opportunities around resilience and how we could do that with all the laboratories if issues arise. I am not talking about things like disaster recovery where a laboratory is flooded or something of that nature. It is more if they lose staff or if a laboratory gets a peak, as in the Jade Goody effect in the UK, the last thing we want in this country is to get back to the backlog situation. We are looking at those options as well. Obviously, we are still teasing it through legally and in other ways in terms of how we can develop it. It will take quite some time. I would not put a year on it. It would be madness to do that. We are committed to developing this. We have the funding available. The building will be available within a number of years. We will certainly try to grow it gradually through the human papillomavirus programme. We face significant challenges in attracting people.