'What if I'd been told earlier?' Women continue to wait for results amid CervicalCheck scandal

"What if I'd been told earlier?"

This is the question no one wants to have to ask when faced with concerning health results.

But six months from now, women - maybe even a woman you know - will be asking this question having received abnormal smear test results.

This is not some over-dramatised scenario being put out there to cause undue alarm, it is an inevitability given the fact that there are now 87,000 women waiting up to 27 weeks for cervical check results.

Ordinarily, these results should take between four and six weeks.

Abnormal results would be an inevitability, which was the exact phrase used by Dr Peter McKenna, head of the HSE's Women and Infants Health Programme, when he appeared before the Oireachtas Health Committee.

"Of course there will be women in that group in the 80,000 that will have abnormal smears.

"We would all share the concern that a waiting time in excess of a couple of months is far from ideal," he said.

Meanwhile, women who went to their doctor as far back as August continue to wait.

Fianna Fáil's Stephen Donnelly pointed to statistics showing that for every 1,000 tests carried out, 15 women would be identified as having pre-cancerous abnormalities.

"A backlog of 78,000 would suggest that about 1,200 women within that cohort will be or have been identified as having pre-cancerous abnormalities but either haven't been tested yet or have been tested and haven't got the results of those tests.

"Given that 1,200 women in this backlog are likely to be identified as having abnormalities is there any clinical risk associated with a woman who has been identified as having an abnormality be it low grade or high grade and a potential wait of six months for her doctor or herself to get those results?"

It's a question that CervicalCheck advocate Stephen Teap, whose wife Irene died after receiving two false negative tests, raised just last month when he expressed fears that the lengthening wait times could lead to a delayed terminal diagnosis.

“We do not want the next scandal to be as a result of a delayed diagnosis in 2019," he told the Irish Examiner.

Dr McKenna said it is not possible to give an estimate on the number of women who will in the coming months receive concerning smear results but he said it would be "foolhardy to say there would be no risk".

Although he moved to assure women that "in general the risk would be low". Whatever the level, any risk will concern women.

We must assume that when Simon Harris moved to provide a free repeat smear test to any woman in the wake of the CervicalCheck scandal last summer, he could not have anticipated the scale of delays that have in turn caused more anxiety.

Neither was it expected that his offer, which Leo Varadkar described in the Dáil as a decision that was made from "the heart rather than the head", would delay the roll-out of HPV testing.

While no screening service will ever be 100% perfect, HPV testing, which the Health Minister had promised to have rolled out by last September, would provide a far more accurate indication of pre-cancerous cells.

But yet women wait.