TD questions why new CervicalCheck review fails to mention Labs responsible for discordant slides
Bríd Smith TD says “key questions still unanswered RCOG report”
People Before Profit TD Bríd Smith has said she is astonished that the review of the CervicalCheck slides by the RCOG does not identify the Laboratories from which the discordant slides came from.
The TD welcomed the review but pointed out that she and other TDs had repeatedly asked the Minister, the Department and the HSE over the last two years to identify from which Labs the misreading of slides came from.
She said: “I have been repeatedly told by the Minister that a breakdown per lab of these discordant slides might be misleading as there are nuances involved. We were repeatedly given the impression that the RCOG review would be comprehensive and complete and assign both the level of discordance and the % of those slides per Laboratory concerned.
“Incredibly having waited for almost a year for this report we find his review doesn’t do that.”
The TD said she would be seeking that the Minister and HSE now answer the question of which labs the slides came from.
“Only then, when we see which labs they came from and what level of discordance is entailed in them can we see what the root cause of the crisis of this.
“Despite the spin from the Minister and Government and the repeated claims by some commentators, the issue remains the outsourcing to private labs, run for profit with lower standards and lower detection rates; telling us the levels of missed cancers is perfectly normal or within statistically acceptable limits does nothing for the women failed and does nothing to hide the truth that a for profit privatised system will prioritise its profits ahead of the service”.
