Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 26 September 2018
168. Deputy Bríd Smith asked the Minister for Health the reason the identity of the labs involved in the false negative results that affected 221 women, as sought in previous parliamentary questions, has not been revealed; and his plans to ensure this information is made available. [38944/18]
View answerScreening tests are a balance of sensitivity and specificity and therefore include both false negative and false positive results which could affect the screening outcome and treatment of a person who may or who may not have a disease. It would be expected that they would have occurred in all labs contracted by CervicalCheck since its inception.
The Deputy may wish to be aware that according to Dr Scally’s report, conducting an audit or review of interval cancers is a good thing to do for the purposes of quality control and, particularly, learning. Dr Scally does point out that it is not without problems when it comes to comparability.
His review has summarised that, “no matter how closely the review panel tries to reproduce the original screening conditions, the conditions of a review are different – the fact that a review includes records of a patient known to have a serious condition, such as cancer, will heighten vigilance and increase reports of abnormality.”
Dr Scally is clear that finding discrepancies on review does not imply that the same findings should have been made under routine conditions. His report states that in a cervical screening programme the result is based on interpretation of appearances on a scan, slide or mammogram in circumstances where the boundary between normality and abnormality is not firmly drawn and this may result in debate between experts as to the appropriate classification of the sample or the interpretation of the image.
