The long delays women have had to endure before getting the results of cervical smear tests will be a thing of the past by the end of this month, the Health Service Executive (HSE) has said.
Tom Finn of the HSE's National Hospitals Office said the entire backlog of smears from across the State would be cleared by the end of this month and after that women can expect a turnaround time for their test results of four weeks.
Last November it emerged that women were waiting six months for the results of routine smear tests from Cork University Hospital (CUH). The backlog at that time stood at 10,938 smears.
They were also waiting five months for the results of smears from St Luke's Hospital, Dublin; three months for results from the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland; and nearly three months for results from Galway's University College Hospital.
Mr Finn told The Irish Times that the backlog from CUH had already been cleared and the backlog from the other hospitals was on course to be cleared by the end of June.
The backlog was outsourced mainly to private laboratories in the US. The Cork samples were sent to Quest Diagnostics in Houston, Texas, while the St Luke's ones were sent to Quest Diagnostics in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Limerick Regional Hospital has been outsourcing analysis of some fine needle breast biopsies to a private laboratory in London and earlier this year it was claimed Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital in Drogheda would be spending €2.4 million this year on sending patients' specimens to private laboratories because of a shortage of staff in its own laboratory.
The decision by the HSE to outsource smear tests to private laboratories was condemned recently by the Medical Laboratory Scientists' Association (MLSA) at its annual conference.
Terry Casey, MLSA general secretary, called on the Government to provide funding to allow for the development of a properly structured cytology screening service in the Republic.
Mr Finn defended the outsourcing saying it was done to clear a backlog of work. He said the turnaround time for smear tests sent to the US was normally five days. The turnaround time for tests sent to the UK is about two weeks.
The majority of the 55 million tests requiring laboratory analysis in the State every year are analysed in over 40 Irish laboratories. "Less than 5 per cent of the work is outsourced," he claimed.
He said the work was outsourced only to fully accredited laboratories. He pointed out that many Irish laboratories were not accredited. "Only about 30 per cent of the laboratory work completed in Ireland is in accredited labs," he said.
Furthermore, he said, the annual bill for outsourced laboratory work was less than €5 million out of a total bill for laboratory services of €360 million.
Asked if the money spent on outsourcing would not be better spent in the Irish system, he said the HSE had invested in a lot of staff and equipment and had outsourced work purely to reduce delays for patients receiving their test results.
Meanwhile, a review of hospital laboratory services across the State for the HSE by Teamwork Consultants is due to be published later this month. The review group was asked to outline how services should be properly configured and while no details of the Teamwork findings are available yet, many working in the area fear it will spell major changes for how they do their jobs.