Dr. Peter McKenna:

On the practical support we have offered, the RCOG report had to be disclosed to patients who wanted a meeting.

In the past, the units were written to and they were told to get on with it. On this occasion, we engaged with the units. We offered support and training as to how to do it and what was likely to lead to the best outcome for the patients and, indirectly, for the staff. Where the staff felt that they were unable to do it we provided a central team that would go to their unit and deliver these results. This is a quite significant difference from how the programme would have interacted with the individual colposcopy units in the past. More than 200 of these visits and meetings with the women have taken place to date, many of them with the local units, most with the central support team. The fact that we have not heard more about them - I am not saying that they are all going absolutely smoothly - says something for the effort that the HSE put into preparing for this event.