U.S. HOSPITAL LAUNCHES REVIEW AFTER HSE CONTROVERSY

A US hospital has launched a review of smear tests following the Vicky Phelan scandal.

The review has been ordered by the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, Texas, as a direct result of the HSE controversy here.

The college’s hospital sends its smear tests to Austin, Texasbased Clinical Pathology Laboratories Inc, the same company that failed to detect Vicky Phelan had cervical cancer, and who paid the now terminally ill mother €2.5million as a result.

Baylor has stated it doesn’t know how many of its patients might be affected by inaccurate CPL readings but will contact any that are detected.

Meanwhile, it has emerged that about 5,000 women are still waiting for a call back from the HSE’s CervicalCheck phone line. Just over 11,000 called the line over the past ten days, and some 4,992 women were yesterday still waiting for a call back.

CervicalCheck’s new head Damien McCallion told RTÉ: ‘We are certainly sorry that it has taken so long to get back to the many women that called us over the last week understand-

ably following the difficulties as a result of the audit.

‘We’re now trying to really increase the number of health professionals and we’re working with our hospitals and community health organisations.’

Elsewhere, as the HSE has identified another woman affected by the controversy sparked since Mrs Phelan’s case came to light, more legal actions are expected to be launched in the coming days and weeks. Up until a few days ago, the HSE had said 206 women had – like Mrs Phelan – been wrongly given the all-clear.

This figure has risen twice, to 208 and, more recently, to 209 and as the figure slowly climbs, more heart-breaking stories are emerging.

On Sunday, Stephen Teap, whose wife Irene died from cervical cancer in 2017, told the Sunday Times he was only informed last Tuesday week that she had received two false negative results.

These happened in 2010 and 2013, before the mother-of-two was eventually diagnosed as having stage 2 cancer in 2016.

The 35-year-old eventually died at the couple’s home in Carrigaline, Co. Cork, on July 26, 2017.

Mr Teap got the news about his wife’s smear results, which were picked up on a July 3 audit of results in 2017, from the HSE over the phone. It is believed that some 15 of at least 17 women who have died were not told about the incorrect results.

And while Mr Teap has gone public, the Irish Daily Mail briefly spoke to another widower last night who did not wish to comment about his wife’s death from cancer in 2016. He is involved in legal action against both the HSE and MedLab.

A LEADING healthcare provider in Houston, Texas, has ordered a full review of all the smear tests it sent to Clinical Pathology Laboratories after learning of the deepening scandal of misread tests that emerged after Vicky Phelan’s court case.

Baylor College of Medicine said it was doing so ‘to ascertain the accuracy of diagnoses for our patients and [we] will do what is necessary to ensure the safety of our patients’.

That is admirably proactive, and it is believed that reviews have been ordered by other hospitals that have also become aware of the Irish situation.

This shows a patient-focused approach that sadly seems to have been entirely lacking in both CervicalCheck and in the HSE in general, with everyone ducking for cover rather than informing the affected women of their misdiagnoses.

That is not the only failure, though. Not all of the misread scans were checked at CPL in Austin, Texas. Some were checked here and others in the UK, and the HSE and CervicalCheck have yet to provide detailed information on failings at labs other than CPL.

That would appear to be very simple information to gather, and consequently very simple to share. As we have seen since the start of the scandal, though, there is a culture in Ireland of parsing information, and sharing it piecemeal in order to make a massive blunder appear more like a series of smaller ones, and somehow mitigate the enormity of the problem.

That is not an acceptable strategy. All information should be placed in the public domain – not tomorrow, not next week, but now. A failure to do so merely compounds the trauma that many women are needlessly facing.

They have been let down badly once, and must not be let down again.