Lab sent out legal threats over plan to tell doctors of test failures
ONE of the labs at the centre of the cervical cancer scandal issued legal warnings to the HSE when it learned CervicalCheck was planning to tell doctors their patients had wrongly received the all-clear, the newly-released memos show.
The series of three memos, sent to HSE boss Tony O’Brien between March and July 2016, were released yesterday afternoon after a stormy meeting of the Oireachtas Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
The first one warned that ‘one of the cytology laboratory providers has sought legal advice into the right of the programme to communicate audit outcome’.
It advised to ‘pause all letters’, ‘await advice of solicitors’ and continue preparing a media response, adding that this should not stop CervicalCheck moving forward ‘with formal communication of audit outcomes’.
Later memos stated the HSE met the laboratory in May and the legal correspondence stopped.
The memos also reveal the HSE had been concerned about negative headlines. A final memo, in July, warned; ‘All international screening programmes will have encountered a media headline that “screening did not diagnose my cancer”. The CervicalCheck Programme has prepared communications materials to ensure transparent, effective and robust communications processes are in place so as to provide clear information for the media and the public, where appropriate, on the CervicalCheck Clinical audit process and results.’
Mr O’Brien confirmed that he had received the memo, and yesterday, ahead of the memos release, he told the committee he had been ‘reassured’ by it.
He said he had re-read the memo recently, and ‘read it as reassuring at the time’. It made clear a communications strategy was in place, and that it had later emerged there had been ‘a disgraceful failure’ in carrying it out.
Mr O’Brien then left the PAC meeting to attend an appointment in Limerick, while TDs waited to be issued the memo. When it arrived, Labour TD Alan Kelly said: ‘Unless I was chairing a different meeting earlier on, I understood from the Director General of the HSE that the communications that he took to be in the memo was with the patients first, through their clinicians.
Concerned about negative headlines
This is not what this reads. Anybody reading that.. It doesn’t use the word patient anywhere.’
Noting a paragraph that read, ‘A communications protocol has been prepared for consultant clinicians to address their questions’, he asked: ‘What about the questions of the women?
‘If that is the memo that’s written, is it any wonder that the women affected weren’t told for years in some cases?’ he asked.
Leo Varadkar was the acting health minister when the first memo was sent in March 2016, while Simon Harris had taken over by the time the second memos were sent in July of that year.
Last night, the department said it is examining its records on CervicalCheck but that neither man was aware of them. It said CervicalCheck documents ‘were not shared outside the CMO and Acute Hospitals Divisions and were not brought to the attention of any minister for health’.
One of the US firms to whom smear test analysis has been outsourced last night said it was not the company which sought legal advice.
A spokesperson for MedLab last night told the Irish Daily Mail: ‘Medlab Pathology categorically did not seek legal advice into the right of cervical cancer to communicate audit outcomes with clinicians or patients.’ MedLab is a subsidiary of Sonic Healthcare, as is another company at the centre of the smear test row, Clinical Pathology Laboratories Ltd.
A spokesman for CPL said last night: ‘Clinical Pathology Laboratories was not involved in seeking legal advice concerning the right of the Cervical Check program to communicate audit outcomes to the clinicians and/or patients. At the time the associated disclosure issues were being discussed in May of 2016, Clinical Pathology Laboratiories was no longer interpreting Pap screening in the program and had not been for three years.’