The Independent Expert Panel Review of cervical screening, to be led by the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, with expert input from the British Society for Colposcopy and Cervical Pathology, will include women who have been diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer and who had previously had smear tests through the national CervicalCheck screening programme. Some of these women have had their cases audited by the programme already, and some have not.
The overall cohort for the review includes 3,112 women in Ireland who were diagnosed with invasive cervical cancer since the beginning of CervicalCheck in September 2008. This figure is made up of:
- 1,482 cases known to CervicalCheck, who have had their cases audited by the programme.
- 1,630 additional cases who were not known to CervicalCheck prior to 2018. These are cases that were registered on the National Cancer Registry of Ireland, as of the 5th May 2018,. These cases have not been audited by CervicalCheck.
Within this overall cohort, the number of women who had previously been screened by the CervicalCheck programme is approximately 1,850. All of these cases will be reviewed by the Independent Clinical Expert Review, whether or not they were previously audited by CervicalCheck.
The 221 women known to be affected are those whose history was audited by CervicalCheck and for whom the audit showed a differing cytology recommendation to their original test. It is to be expected that more cases of discordant results will be found once the Review led by the RCOG has concluded.
In regard to clinical audit within CervicalCheck, this was paused pending the outcome of the Scoping Inquiry. Dr Scally’s report makes two recommendations in relation to clinical audit to improve the service going forward, and these will be part of the implementation plan which I intend to bring to Government.
In relation to the 18 month audit timeline, I have asked the HSE to respond directly to the Deputy on this issue.
