All samples for cervical cancer screening provided by Irish women this year have been sent abroad for processing, despite promises made after the CervicalCheck controversy to create a national lab capacity.
The only Irish cervical screening lab, at the Coombe Women & Infants University Hospital, stopped processing samples last December when the Dublin hospital suffered a cyberattack. While the hospital quickly resumed services, the lab has continued to export all samples for screening to the US ever since.
According to a spokeswoman for CervicalCheck, the national cervical screening programme, the Coombe lab has not been in a position to provide screening due to “a combination of factors, including the significant cyberattack it suffered in December 2021 and staff absence due to illness”.
“We are grateful to our laboratory provider in the US for processing samples during this post-cyberattack period, ensuring we continue to meet our key performance indicator of getting [test] result letters to women within four weeks in 90 per cent of cases.”
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Between January and July this year, 159,206 samples were sent for testing to Quest Diagnostics in the US, she confirmed. Through the US service, CervicalCheck has cleared a backlog that arose during the Covid-19 pandemic and is up to date with invites for screening. The spokeswoman said the service is issuing letters of invitation to all women as their screening date falls due.
Asked when screening in Ireland would resume, she said the Coombe is scheduled to resume its cytology screening service, via the new National Cervical Screening Lab (NCSL), next month. Previous deadlines to restart the service have not been met. The Health Service Executive said last May it would resume “in the coming weeks” once cover had been put in place for staff absence and IT systems were restored, but this did not happen.
Construction of the NCSL began in January 2021 and has been completed this month. Fit-out is under way, which will be followed by testing and quality assurance inspections, the spokeswoman said.
“Once these inspections are complete, all going well, the NCSL will be ready to begin operations by year-end.”
[ Number of legal cases related to CervicalCheck stands at 305Opens in new window ]
However, the availability of skilled staff will be a “key limiting factor” for the full establishment of the lab, she warned. So far 12 staff have been recruited, but five posts remain vacant. Newly-appointed consultants working in screening are required to fulfil a number of conditions, including five years of specialist training, completion of specialist exams and a pre-examination period when they report on 850 cases, including 200 training slides.
Last year, the Coombe lab tested about 40,000 samples, while more than 250,000 were sent to the US for testing by Quest.
In 2018, it emerged some women diagnosed with cervical cancer were not told their previous smear tests had been reviewed, often with a different result. Apologising in October 2019 to victims of the CervicalCheck controversy, then taoiseach Leo Varadkar said the new lab would “bring more testing back to Ireland”. Arising from an official report into the controversy, the HSE committed to developing a national screening lab at the Coombe.
