‘THERE HAS BEEN A COVER-UP... SO WHO KNEW?’ ASKS SOLICITOR

‘Forcing her to remain silent’

‘When were they told?’

VICKY Phelan’s solicitor yesterday claimed there has been a cover-up in the cervical screening scandal.

He said the decision not to tell affected but unaware women – who could go on to develop cancer – was something that was ‘consciously done’.

‘The inquiry should be looking at the cover-up,’ Cian O’Carroll said on the Today programme with Seán O’Rourke on RTÉ Radio 1, as a statutory inquiry into the scandal was announced by the Taoiseach. ‘Who was responsible? Who knew?’ Mr O’Carroll demanded.

A cover-up was clear from documents revealed in court, he said. ‘It is clear from what we have seen, and from the letter of July 2016,’ he said, referring to correspondence telling a concerned doctor to file the notice of false negatives with patients’ general notes – without any instruction that the patients themselves, or the families of the deceased, be informed.

His comments came as Minister for Health Simon Harris said he had written to Hiqa to request a statutory investigation on the screening programming.

He said it would have full powers to compel witnesses and documents from the HSE and his department. Mr Harris also said he is appointing an international clinical panel.

It will carry out independent clinical reviews of the women affected. He said a liaison nurse will coordinate with the women.

Mr O’Carroll said there was a need to identify the people who made the choice ‘to deceive the families of the women who are now dead, and the women who are now ill’.

He repeated: ‘We have to find out why a direction was given to deceive the families of women who were dead and the women who are now gravely ill.’

Mr O’Carroll said it had to be asked why Mrs Phelan’s case had been fought so tenaciously by the HSE.

There had been an attempt to force her into a confidentiality clause to conclude the case, he added. ‘But through her courage, she ultimately defeated them on that,’ he said:

‘Enormous effort and energy were put into forcing her to remain silent,’ solicitor Mr O’Carroll further alleged.

Asked if he had been contacted by other affected Solicitor: Cian O’Carroll women, Mr O’Carroll said: ‘There are a lot [of women] out there who are very worried and telling a story that is remarkably like Vicky Phelan’s story.

‘I think that’s why they’re making contact. They have cervical cancer after a history of clear smears. Now they are awaiting a phone call. I wonder will they all get that telephone call.’

He pointed out that the clinical audit and look-back when concerns were finally raised were both carried out by Med Labs, the organisation ‘that performed the screenings in the first place’.

CervicalCheck had trusted the job to the same provider, ‘the very people’ whose diagnoses had been called into question and who had done ‘such an appalling job in the first place’, he said,

‘Clearly there is a risk that their reporting would tend away from liability on themselves,’ said Mr O’Carroll, who is based in Tipperary and specialises in medical negligence cases.

The solicitor suggested that pricing was the reason the job of screening smear tests had been outsourced to the US.

He said it cost one third of the price to have the smears screened in America rather than Ireland, but the level of detection was one-third less than in Europe, 1.2% against 1.8%.

He said: ‘If it is the case that price was the determining factor, then it’s reasonable to say that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys – but unfortunately women are paying the price.’

American reviews might be appropriate in that culture, where women had smears annually, he said, but women in Ireland were having smears only once in every three years.

He said in his opinion all 1,480 Irish women who developed cervical cancer who had previously had clear smears should have those slides taken out of the USA and ‘examined independently by a cytologist’.

It need not take long, he said. ‘It is not such an enormous task as it sounds. Each slide takes around five minutes to be correctly viewed and reported on thereafter.’

He said he believed the Government needed to put a very clear plan in place this week because ‘everybody’s a bit on edge. It’s shocking’.

Half the women who had red flag early smears were not told, but in the case of the other half, it had to be asked, ‘When were they told?’ he said. Mr O’Carroll said he believed most of these women were only told relatively recently, and one woman that he personally knew about had been told only ‘in recent weeks’.

The conduct throughout by CervicalCheck had been ‘appalling’, but it was ‘particularly disgusting’ when in July 2016, after the HSE had spent a year assessing what to do and how to communicate with clinicians around the country, ‘they chose to write to those clinicians where a woman has died, to tell them to simply record it in the women’s notes. In other words, “Do not tell her family”.

‘They did that knowing that people were dying, and that people had died,’ he said.

People had been entitled to know all along because there was a legal issue, not only because of the cost of their own care, but also in consideration of any family they might leave behind, he added.

‘Did the new ageing of the cancer have a bearing of the care received, if it was three years older than anyone thought?’ he added. ‘That very information was kept from Vicky Phelan’s doctor for two years and from Vicky herself for three.’

As to the announced inquiry, it should not be carried out exclusively by Hiqa, the Health Information and Quality Authority, he maintained.

‘Hiqa may have a role, being geared towards clinical standards, but should not control the inquiry because matters now concerned governance in CervicalCheck, the Department of Health and the HSE,’ Mr O’Carroll declared.

An inquiry had to look at the quality issue and whether the screening was to best practice by international standards, and it also had to look at the ‘cover-up’ and why it was that Mrs Phelan’s case was fought so determinedly, he said.

‘What was it about this case that she would be forced into a confidentiality clause? Clearly people in office knew that this case would cause trouble for people in CervicalCheck, the Department of Health and the HSE,’ Mr O’Carroll declared.