Stephen Donnelly (Wicklow, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

Yes. My understanding is that the time is from when you know, but let us get a legal view on that.

In response to Deputy Kelly's second question, there will be several matters on which I will be writing to the HSE. Yes, it is my intent, and I will be including this in writing to the HSE, to say that what we mean in the second sub-clause by "after screening" is what the 221+ group means, which is at, or a reasonable time after, diagnosis and, critically, that patient representatives including the 221+ group will be included in the design of exactly that.

In response to Deputy Shortall, the Coombe lab is a very impressive facility. It is now staffing up with histopathology and various other skill sets, but because screening was shut down in Ireland, it is having to train up a whole new group of healthcare professionals because the skill set has been lost to some extent. That does take a little bit of time. It has started with CervicalCheck samples in recent weeks. The aim is to get up to about 10% of those samples this quarter and then to ramp up as quickly as possible. The kind of timeframe I was discussing with the lab was about five years. What was said is that we will always want some samples going abroad. This is backed up by Dr. Scally's report. We do not want to be reliant on just one lab.

In terms of the five years, I did press and ask if we could go faster. The lab will if it can. The point it made was that it is about training up new healthcare professionals. Even quite skilled clinicians who are coming in require several years of training to be able to analyse the individual slides and samples. It is not a funding issue. It is nothing other than that it just takes-----

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