CervicalCheck: 'I feared legal action after letter' - Lorraine Walsh

CervicalCheck campaigner Lorraine Walsh did not include serious concerns over a review of smear slides in her resignation letter, as she feared the Department of Health would take legal action against her.

Ms Walsh has hit out at the Taoiseach after he suggested that her resignation did not relate to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) report that was published last week.

Ms Walsh, who quit the CervicalCheck steering committee at the end of October, said she could not express confidence in the UK college’s screening review process, and was forced to step down as a result.

She told the Irish Examiner that she did not put her concerns around the RCOG review in her letter of resignation as she was afraid of litigation. However, she had raised issues as far back as September and had made efforts to speak with Health Minister Simon Harris three times before she resigned.

“What do you do when you tell the most senior people in the land of your concerns and they ignore you — what do you do?” she asked.

Ms Walsh , pointed to the fact that she had already been sent a strongly worded letter from Tony Holohan, the Department of Health’s chief medical officer, earlier this year.

The letter, sent in March, accused Ms Walsh of making “baseless and untrue” allegations and added that she could “anticipate a very strong response” if she made such comments in public.

Ms Walsh said:

I felt I had to be careful about what I put in writing to the department.

The RCOG review found that, for 159 women, including 12 who have died, there were “missed opportunities” to prevent or diagnose their cancer earlier.

It also emerged that batches of women’s slides were returned to RCOG by the HSE because of discrepancies with the data. There were issues around the labelling of slides and, in some cases, women — including Ms Walsh — received two different sets of results.

Speaking in the Dáil, Taoiseach Leo Varadkar said he read Ms Walsh’s resignation letter when it arrived on October 31, which was five weeks before the RCOG report was published.

Mr Varadkar said: “It was extraordinarily complimentary of the minister, in particular, and of many of the people who now work in CervicalCheck. It did not mention RCOG at all. I appreciate that Ms Walsh is honest and truthful in what she has said since then, although that was not the reason that was given five weeks ago.”

However, the campaigner said: “I resigned because of the RCOG review, I resigned on October 31, but to add insult to injury I didn’t have my own review at that stage, I only received my own RCOG review on November 15.

“I didn’t have hard evidence, I didn’t have the facts that I could back up with actual proof at that stage.

“So I didn’t put any allegations in the letter, I didn’t put any of those things in the letter because I didn’t have my RCOG review and I hadn’t become the victim of my own concerns at that stage.”

A spokesperson for Mr Harris said the minister was “very grateful” for what Ms Walsh said in her resignation letter, and hopes to continue to work closely with her.