Bríd Smith (Dublin South Central, People Before Profit Alliance) | Oireachtas source

The table shows that the rates of error in the Quest laboratories in Illinois and Teterboro, and the Clinical Pathology Laboratories, CPL, in Texas, were five, three and seven times that of the Coombe, respectively. I would not be alarmed if the different was only 0.5% or so, and neither should the Minister be. However, he should be alarmed at this rate, compared to the rate in the Coombe. If we had included the 38 slides that showed no change in this analysis, would that have changed the statistical information? All or a significant number of those slides could have come from the Coombe. We knew from the get-go that the labs in America were substandard, that they were not ISO accredited at the time, and that each laboratory technician examined 100 slides a day as opposed to the 60 slides a day examined in the Coombe. We did not know whether the standard of education was the same as in Irish laboratories. When we outsourced this service, everything was at a lower standard in the American labs than in the Irish labs. We knew that because there were huge protestations from clinical laboratory technicians, professional organisations and politicians in this House. This report gives us a glimpse into why that might have happened.

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