‘No apology’ for cancer campaign that strained HSE
John McCormack, chief executive of the Irish Cancer Society, said the organisation was making no apology for the fact that their €200,000 cervical screening awareness campaign launched in February 2005 had overloaded the system.
The average waiting time for a smear test in Ireland is four months but some women are having to wait for up to nine months for test results.
In Britain and Australia where national screening programmes have been operating for 15 years, the average waiting time is around six weeks.
The ICS found that the number of women presenting for smears in family planning clinics and hospitals increased noticeably between September and November last year during the society’s national and regional radio campaign.
“In the last 18 months we have done a huge amount of lobbying and raising awareness of cervical screening and we have driven a huge volume of women into clinics and hospitals to have smears and the 11 laboratories in the country just cannot cope,” he said.
Mr McCormack also welcomed the move by the HSE to deal with the backlog in sending over 30,000 smear tests to the US. What was crucial was that women continued to come forward to be tested, he said.
The Health Service Executive (HSE) stressed that it wanted women to come forward to be tested and said the decision to outsource smear tests to a laboratory in Dallas, Texas, was made on the basis of urgent medical need.
“I think it is an appropriate solution to an unacceptable problem,” said assistant national director of the Health Service Executive’s National Hospital Office, Tom Finn who intends getting waiting times for test results down to four weeks as quickly as possible.
He said tests were sent to the US because no similar facility in the EU could cope with the volume of tests.
He also insisted that the problem had arisen because of difficulties in getting trained staff in Ireland.
“We have the technology but we do not have the manpower.”
Mr Finn said plans to have a national cervical screening programme in place next year were going ahead but that in the meantime he would be ensuring that hospitals would have special “pressure valves” to ensure that women were not left waiting for months for their test results.
* Anyone with queries about cervical smear tests or cervical cancer can call the National Cancer Helpline on freefone 1800 200 700.
