‘Quick and efficient’ inquiry risks getting bogged down as women are dying
THE optimistic promise was that it would be fast and efficient – but now the scoping inquiry into the CervicalCheck scandal has become bogged down in a trawl of documents and complexity.
For some of the seriously ill women who developed cervical cancer after getting a wrong smear test result, and were then not informed of an internal CervicalCheck audit confirming the mistake, the delay searching for the truth is agonising.
Yesterday’s interim report of Dr Gabriel Scally, who was asked to do a scoping inquiry to be completed in late June, was able to give no insight yet into a range of key issues.
These include how the mistakes were made; the standards of safety at the laboratories; the failures to pass on information about the internal audit reports; and where the chain of culpability lies.
Cian O’Carroll, solicitor for some of the victims, wondered if the scoping exercise had mushroomed into a full-scale inquiry and if there was more merit in curtailing some of its reach.
He pointed out that issues could be probed more extensively at the wider investigation which has been pledged.
Dr Scally is clearly frustrated by the slow release of documents from the Department of Health and the HSE.
The scanned format of much of the documents he has received already makes it difficult to read and cumbersome.
His report states that the “truth was withheld” from the women.
But we are no clearer on how this happened and the reasons why.
He has spoken to some health officials – but we were not told what their testimony was, and it is too early to analyse it.
There is no information on the safety of the laboratories, whether a pattern of mistakes in smear tests was found, and no insight yet into the manner in which CervicalCheck was run.
All of this is yet to be revealed through documentation and interviews of health officials and other witnesses.
This will clearly take months – as will the interviews of the 209 women, including the relatives of those who have died.
Dr Scally is clearly moved by the women he has met, and anxious to allow them to give an account of their experience.
He refers to the report of the inquiry by Mr Justice Quirke into the Magdalene
Laundries. He said it was clear that his recognition of distress and suffering was vitally important to those affected.
His motivation is wellintentioned, but the interviews are likely to take months and might well be as a separate exercise.
He is planning on more individual reports before the major findings at the end of the summer.
Separate modules include one on the non-disclosure of the individual audits confirming the smear test mistakes, and also another looking at the operation of CervicalCheck.
The recommendation that the consent form signed by women at the time of their test explicitly guarantees them full access to their screening record and timely disclosure of any details about errors or failures is welcome. But in the light of the stalling on the release of personal files to women and documents to the inquiry, there remain question marks over how it will work in practice.