Anger at HSE as 6,000 women need repeat smear

The HSE has failed since October to produce a plan to tackle the Cervical Check backlog as advocates warn more women may die.

It is understood Health Minister Simon Harris told the HSE to come up with a capacity plan to deal with a spiraling backlog more than three months ago, but this has yet to materialise, with women now waiting 22 weeks for smear results.

Advocate Stephen Teap, whose wife Irene died after after receiving two false negative tests, now fears more women could face a delayed terminal diagnosis because of the wait times.

It comes as it emerged that 6,000 women must now have a repeat smear because their slides were not checked within the acceptable timeline.

Mr Harris and the HSE are under pressure to provide answers to the latest CervicalCheck controversy and it understood he is willing to cut short his paternity leave next week to address the Dáil.

Advocates now fear that women will lose faith in the entire screening service and in the Dáil, Labour leader Brendan Howlin asked: “How much scandal can the screening programme take?”

Patient representatives also hit out the Government and HSE, venting fury that the latest issue was revealed through the media before the women themselves are informed.

“If they had acted quicker in verifying the numbers, they could have written to these women before it became public,” said Mr Teap. Now, he said, women would be “looking at the letterbox wondering if they will be one of the ones who gets a letter”.

Tánaiste Simon Coveney was forced to strongly deny that the Government was trying to hide the latest revelations after being pressed on the fact that the HSE first

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Mr Coveney also said Mr Harris was told of the discrepancy with secondary HPV testing in December but defended his Cabinet colleague by stating: “The minister sought regular updates but a final report was not available to him relating the numbers involved or who they were.”

The women impacted by the latest CervicalCheck controversy had been asked to get a secondary HPV test after low-grade changes were detected in their initial smears.

The test for HPV should be carried out within 30 days of the sample been given by a woman but it has now emerged that Quest Diagnostics failed to meet this deadline in the case of 6,000 samples which were taken from 2015 onwards.

Lorraine Walsh, who was one of the 221 women impacted by last year’s CervicalCheck scandal, questioned why the lab had not adhered to standards and why CervicalCheck had not carried out audits on the facilities contracted.

“What happened before was human error, in this case we are talking about a lack of standard operating procedures.”

While the screening service processes about 250,000 cervical tests each year an extra 84,000 women came forward for screening last year due to concerns about cervical screening following the CervicalCheck audit.

The HSE confirmed that about 82,000 of these are still being processed leading to a 22-week wait time for results compare to the normal two to four weeks.

Mr Teap said: “The backlog is my biggest worry, that backlog has to be reduced.

“We do not want the next scandal to be as a result of a delayed diagnosis in 2019.

“All this is going to take is for one person to die or someone to get a terminal diagnosis or a cervical cancer diagnosis, that’s my biggest concern.”

Ms Walsh, who along with Mr Teap sits on the CervicalCheck steering committee, said she had raised the lack of a HSE plan around delays with the Minister as far back as October.

A Department of Health spokesperson said: “It is important to clarify this is a separate issue to the backlog of smear tests.