Playing blind man’s buff with the country’s most complex organisation

It is three weeks today since the judgment in the Vicky Phelan case sparked off the CervicalCheck scandal. Sadly, because of the seriousness of the issues, there is scaremongering about the safety of the cervical screening programme.

What is known is that essential, important information about misdiagnosis in a screening programme, which was never going to deliver fully accurate results, was not conveyed to patients when subsequent diagnostic tests showed them to have cancer.

Tragically, some of those cases are at an advanced stage. Eighteen women affected have since died.