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

I am sorry to hear about the experience of the family the Deputy mentioned. I am not familiar with the case and I do not want to comment on it for those reasons, but I extend my condolences and sympathies to the family she mentioned. The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, RCOG, audit report has not been shared with Government as of yet. I have not seen it and it is not with Government. I agree with the Deputy that we should condemn any leaking of documents such as this to the media. We agreed with the patient advocates and with the 221+ support group that this report would be handled differently from the CervicalCheck audit. Therefore, what is happening at the moment is individual women are being told about their individual results and they are being offered meetings. Some have accepted meetings and others have been happy to receive the information by writing. We agreed that this report would not be published and would not be made available until each of those women had the opportunity to have that meeting first because they are the ones who should hear it first. It should not go to politicians or the media first. We do not have the report and it will not be published until every woman has had the chance to hear about her own results and to have a meeting if she wants one. Once that has been done, it will go to the Minister for Health and then it will be published. At that point a briefing will be provided for the Opposition parties.

It is important to point out a few things about the screening process once again because this will require a lot of explanation and interpretation. We have all heard in this House on many occasions and we all understand that cervical screening is not diagnostic. We all know that but I am not sure we all fully appreciate what that means in practice. In practice that means that if 1,000 healthy women are screened, roughly 12 cases where there are abnormalities will be picked up. In roughly eight cases those abnormalities will be missed and that is to be expected. What happens with the 12 cases is they get early diagnosis and treatment and that is a good thing. What happens with the eight cases of missed abnormalities is they do not get early diagnosis and treatment. They get picked up on a subsequent screen or they get picked up when they have symptoms. That is how screening works. It is a lost opportunity that in those cases it was not picked up earlier but it is not in itself a failing in the screening programme or negligence. That has not fully come across even two years later. In any screening programme, even the best in the world, there will be a very high number of false negatives and abnormalities missed. It does not mean the screening programme is inferior to any other screening programme in the world or lesser. That needs to be explained again and again because I am not sure it is always fully understood.

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