Health plans need resources to work

WHEN, after the CervicalCheck scandal came to light last April, Health Minister Simon Harris offered free repeat smear tests for women concerned about previous results, the reaction among health professionals was mixed.

The HSE was concerned at the sheer scale of the task, and doctors warned that the infrastructure was not in place to deal with the numbers involved. They saw it, at best, as ill-thought-through and, at worst, a firefighting PR exercise.

At the time, there were a lot of very concerned women seeking reassurance, and that was the least they could be offered.

Indeed, Vicky Phelan herself was very public in her praise of the speed and humanity of the decision, and hers was a response that should have some bearing on how it is viewed.

The seeming inability of the health service to respond to the emotional needs of women, instead taking a detached clinical view, was widely condemned at the time, because it seemed to coldly dismiss the very real fears not just of those directly affected, but also those worried their own results might yet be found to have been misread.

The dismal official response to the Hep C scandal still haunts Fine Gael, so its response to CervicalCheck surely showed lessons had been learned.

Whatever the reality of Minister Harris’s decision, though, it remains a fact that thousands of women who had new tests still have no results and, indeed, face a very long wait for them because of the backlog that has built up.

In the Dáil yesterday, the Taoiseach accepted this, saying that in retrospect the Government might have acted with its head instead of with its heart.

The strain on resources is such that the more efficient HPV test now will not be rolled out this year as planned, but next year at the earliest.

The backlog also means that the very reassurance it was introduced to offer now seems further away than ever, as women wait up to 27 weeks for results of their smear retests.

Even if the plan was the right thing to do, it should not have been announced without the certain knowledge that resources would be there to see it through, speedily and convincingly.

Yes, we want governments to be sympathetic to emotional as well as clinical needs, but any such decision must be backed up by a plan to deliver it in a meaningful way.