I warned the HSE about US tests but it went on ahead
‘He dismissed my concerns’
A SENIOR advisor to the cervical screening programme said he and several colleagues resigned after their concerns about the outsourcing of smear tests to America was ‘dismissed’ by the current head of the HSE.
Dr David Gibbons said that he went to Tony O’Brien, who was then heading the Irish Cervical Screening programme and is currently the HSE director general. He told him that shipping smear tests to America would cause big problems that would not be detected for a decade.
Later, Dr Gibbons estimated that there could be approximately 1,000 samples a year given the all-clear in America that should have been sent for a second check.
Vicky Phelan, the woman at the centre of the scandal, yesterday hailed Dr Gibbons as a hero and said that Mr O’Brien should now consider his position.
Dr Gibbons said: ‘As chair of the [cervical screening] quality assurance committee, I went to see Mr Tony O’Brien... I met him in his office, and there was one other person [there]. I expressed those concerns and I said over a 10-year period this will cause problems and the problems won’t become apparent for 10 years. He dismissed my concerns,’ said Dr Gibbons.
In protest, Dr Gibbons resigned as chair of the committee. According to Dr Gibbons, other committee members resigned as well. Even after he quit, he and three other scientists went back to Mr O’Brien and warned him that the situation was ‘dangerous’, he said.
From 2006 to 2008, Dr Gibbons was the chair of the quality assurance committee as the programme was about to be rolled out. At the time he was also running a large cytology screening laboratory in Dublin.
Dr Gibbons said that his lab was experiencing a backlog due to under-resourcing and as a result the testing was outsourced to America. Dr Gibbons said: ‘The US system screens on a yearly basis. They do a quick screen every year so they get repeated bites of the cherry. In Ireland, the system had been set up with a three-year scheme and it works if you have a deep screen every three years. Our scientists were screening 25-30 cases a day while the American scientists were screening 80-100. So we were worried.’
‘When we got the smears back from America, we looked at their figures and they were finding significantly fewer high grade dysplasia than we were in the same population.’
He added of the HSE: ‘They continued to push on with introducing this outsourcing, despite our advice.’ The HSE was contacted in relation to this story but comment was not available before going to print.