H ow much do we value lives of mothers, wives, girlfriends and sisters?

YOU know you are in meltdown when, seven days into the biggest health scandal in the history of the State, the situation is getting worse. A week on, we have yet to move from total confusion to understanding. The State’s three-card trick of denial, delay and defend at all costs seems to be the stock response, when all that the women trapped in this trauma want is the truth about their health. The chilling official indifference to their plight suggests prevarication still seems better than cure.

As if there has not been enough distressing and unsettling news surrounding this scandal, today it is revealed that our health authorities knew as far back as 2012 that a US lab which was part of our cervical cancer screening programme missed abnormalities in a smear test.

But the case taken by the woman involved against the HSE and Quest Diagnostics was settled in 2013.

Critically, the details of the settlement were confidential. The statutory alarm bells that might have rung and alerted us all to the need for full disclosure were thus muffled.

The case appears troublingly similar to that of Vicky Phelan. Is it conceivable that had we known about this person, the outcomes for others caught in this interminable nightmare might have been different?

We began last week with 208 women and the number has now risen to 1,500 whose cases have not been audited. If this earlier case had been flagged, might more have been spared this unconscionable ordeal?

Where there were grounds for concern, there are now escalating levels of stress and anxiety. Trust and confidence in a vital life-saving programme is being eroded on a daily basis.

And it will still be weeks before all of the 1,500 women now affected will even be made aware that their cases are to be reviewed by CervicalCheck.

With all the warning signals broken, it falls to the Government to bring authority and clarity to this dark and heart-searing saga. But the personal tragedies are already becoming politicised. The Dáil default positions of attack and defend have kicked in.

WHAT this and so many other catastrophic cases within our health service have highlighted is that the interests of the ‘system’ are still central, instead of making the patient central to the system. We know there are thousands of caring professionals within our health care services but they are operating in extreme conditions.

How shocked can we really be that a service that can leave 90-year-old patients on trolleys for several days should have failed in standards of care, decency and human dignity?

Of course, we need a Commission of Investigation and we may need to change the law so that it will not be held behind closed doors. It is conceivable that a Hiqa investigation may also be held.

But we will need to change so much more than that. We are continually hearing about audits and costs. Fundamentally, what matters here is putting the minds of extremely frightened women at ease.

The over-arching question is: How much do we value these lives, the lives of our mothers, wives, girlfriends and sisters?

We like to believe we can never demonstrate this in monetary terms. But if their true worth is reflected in their shabby treatment in this debacle, then we have reached an all-time low.