Trust in cervical screening systems is “significantly lower” in Ireland than Scotland following the CervicalCheck controversy, a new research paper suggests.
On Thursday, the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI) published a research bulletin titled The impact of CervicalCheck controversy on public trust and blame for interval cancers.
In 2018 it emerged scores of women with cervical cancer were not told that smear test results showing them to be in the clear were inaccurate and the revised test results were kept from them for years.
The controversy emerged after Vicky Phelan settled a High Court case against a US laboratory that was subcontracted by CervicalCheck, the national cervical screening programme, to assess the tests.
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The research investigated the impact of this controversy on public trust and the attribution of blame for interval cancers – cancers diagnosed after a negative screening result.
It also used an experiment to test the impact of new official information materials, which are partly designed to correct misconceptions by enhancing understanding about screening.
The research conducted a comparative study between Ireland, where the controversy occurred, and Scotland, where it did not. Scotland was chosen due to its similar population and screening programme.
Data was collected from 872 eligible participants in Ireland and 400 in Scotland, all of whom were women aged between 23 and 65 in Ireland and between 23 and 64 in Scotland.
“Trust in the screening system was significantly lower in Ireland compared to Scotland, indicating that the CervicalCheck controversy has negatively impacted trust in screening,” the researchers found.
“Irish participants exhibited particularly low trust levels towards the laboratories analysing screening samples and the screening results.”
They added: “Similarly, participants in Ireland assigned more blame than participants in Scotland to the screening programme in cases of detectable abnormal cells in previous screening samples (false negative results) and advanced cancer stages.”
Prof Pete Lunn, of the behavioural research unit at the ESRI, said the goal of the research was to generate “a base line data about what the controversy has done”.
Prof Lunn said the lack of trust in the system is “not hugely surprising” as the news stories about the controversy “rumbled on for substantial period after the story first broke”.
“It shows the updated materials are effective, but it hasn’t made up for all the damage the controversy did,” he added.
Following the controversy coming to light, Dr Gabrial Scally a Northern Irish public health physician, said the screening system was “doomed to fail at some point” due to a “demonstrable deficit” of clear governance and reporting lines between CervicalCheck, the National Screening Service and Health Service Executive management.
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