Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

First, I offer my condolences once again to the family and friends of Ms Emma Mhic Mhathúna at what is a difficult time for them, and also to the families of other women who lost their lives to cervical cancer. I assure everyone in this House that Government is deeply committed to ensuring cervical screening continues and provides Irish women with a high-quality service in which they can have confidence.

As I have said before, I am determined that some good should come from all of this. We must make cervical cancer a rare disease in Ireland and we must build a more open and honest health service. We can do those things by continuing with cervical screening, improving the screening programme with new testing, bringing in the HPV vaccine for boys and encouraging parents to ensure their children have that vaccine, reforming our health service, changing our laws about open disclosure and, more important, bringing about a culture in our health service of honesty, openness and disclosure.

The issues the Deputy raised emerged at the outset of the CervicalCheck controversy. Many women were concerned and it is essential we give them the facts, which is why a scoping inquiry led by Dr. Scally and his expert team was established by the Government with the support of the Oireachtas. Dr. Scally provided the final report of his inquiry in September and he gave us a welcome reassurance of the quality and standards of the laboratories being used by CervicalCheck, which he and his team visited. He was satisfied with the quality management process in these laboratories. It is important to say he confirmed he found no reason that the existing contracts for the laboratories should not continue until our new HPV-testing system is in place.

Dr. Scally also said the continuation of screening in the coming months is of crucial importance, an assessment with which the Government fully agrees. Screening does not detect all cancers and pre-cancers but it detects most of them, which saves lives. As Dr. Scally points out in his report, if 1,000 women are screened for cervical cancer, approximately 20 will have pre-cancerous cells or cancer. Screening will pick up 15 of those 20 but it will miss five. It is a misunderstanding to say that missing five of those 20 is negligent. In some cases it may be but in the vast majority it is not. Those are the limitations of screening, unfortunately. CervicalCheck has been successful in reducing cervical cancer rates in Ireland. As stated in the Scally report, the lifetime risk of women developing cancer was one in 135 in 2015, whereas it had been one in 96, which is a substantial improvement, falling by approximately 7% a year.

I am happy to say that heads of an agreement have been signed with the contracted laboratories to extend their contracts pending introduction of the new HPV-testing programme, which allows for the continuation of the existing service without interruption. This follows on from detailed negotiations undertaken by the HSE. Agreement on the extension of these contracts was reached on 13 October but this is subject to formal conclusion of the contract, which has not yet taken place. In these negotiations, discussions focused on extending the capacity of the laboratories to deal with the backlog of smears, which arose as a result of significantly increased demand for repeat smear tests that was seen in recent months for understandable reasons. We must catch up on that backlog, notwithstanding the shortage of cytologists.

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