Thousands of women in Northern Ireland will have their smear test results reviewed as part of a major investigation of cervical screening dating back to 2008. Some of the 17,500 women being affected will have to have new smear tests carried out. The Southern Trust says it plans to contact all affected women beginning from Tuesday with the process likely to take months.
The move comes after a highly critical report commissioned by the Royal College of Pathologists (RCPath), which found several cytology staff were “significantly underperforming,” and mechanisms to check their work were flawed. It also identified incorrectly reported negative results and a lack of management action in response to critical issues.
The RCPath report recommended that those most at risk, including women with negative or inadequate results since 2008, should be offered a negative HPV test to reassure them. But the Southern Trust said it did not have the resources to deliver this. The Department of Health called the findings “clearly unacceptable.”
Last year, Public Health Wales issued a national alert for every woman who received an “inadequate” cervical screening result since April 2018. Some 90,000 women were affected after the failure of a computer algorithm that was introduced in 2018 to support HR staff in updating patient lists resulted in a delay of smear test results being sent to GP surgeries
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