Service-levels in smear testingThere was a piece on yesterday evening’s RTE news about the cervical cancer screening programme. Apparently the media focus on the unfortunate Jade Goody has encouraged an increase in applicants for the programme so at least there is something good coming out of a terribly sad situation. Ireland has one of the highest rates of cervical cancer in Western Europe. Figures that I found ranged from 200 – 250 new cases and 70 – 90 deaths per year. A few weeks ago I wrote about my concern that the Chief Executive of the National Cancer Screening Service had been quoted saying that false results from Quest Diagnostics in the US didn’t impact us in Ireland because the problems were associated with Vitamin D tests, not cervical smears. I feel that a quality issue in any part of an organisation should lead us to at least examine quality in other parts of the same organisation. On the back of this piece I got a phone call from someone who had previously worked in a cytology lab in this country. She’s really concerned about the quality of service that Irish patients are getting from Quest. Now, of course we can say that in her situation she would say that. However she made some interesting points to me. One of them was that by outsourcing all of this work we are effectively losing the skill within the country. Having read up on the US situation it is clear that many there consider cervical smear cytology to be a dying profession mainly because of vaccine take-up. So if we are not going to have a vaccine programme in the foreseeable future and are instead going to rely on screening don’t we have a responsibility to Irish women and their families to ensure those tests are as accurate as possible? A lot of the professionals on internet forums and notice boards in the US are complaining about the unreasonable pressures and workload in private labs such as Quest which inevitably leads to missing problem results. Quest is mentioned by name on many occasions. Some years ago there was a problem in the UK and many women died having been incorrectly given the all-clear on their smear tests. In fact when I lived in the UK I used to come back to Ireland for my smear tests as I just didn’t trust the system. We cannot allow such doubt to happen here especially having encouraged women to come forward for testing. Do any of us really want to see a major court case taken against the State for negligence in years to come? Do we want needless deaths on our conscience? Quest may be doing a good job but personally I’d like a lot more reassurance on this one. Add a CommentYour comment will appear once it has been approved. |