HSE chief fears CervicalCheck controversy has been ‘lost in translation’

HSE chief Tony O’Brien says he asked CervicalCheck head Gráinne Flannelly to “consider carefully” before she resigned on Saturday night.

“I spoke to her at some length on Saturday evening. I didn’t want her to do something in haste,” he told RTÉ’s Today with Sean O’Rourke show.

Dr Flannelly’s resignation came after concerns were raised following a court case taken by Limerick woman Vicky Phelan, who was not told about an incorrect 2011 smear test until September 2017, despite a 2014 audit by CervicalCheck showing that the test was wrong.

It subsequently emerged that many other women had smear tests reviewed but had not been informed of the outcome.

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Mr O’Brien said he did not consider steeping down sooner from his role because of the CervicalCheck controversy. He is due to leave the position in the summer.

He acknowledged that the fact he was the former head of the cervical check programme meant that the issue was “very personal” to him.

It was also an issue “of concern and disappointment” that he had not been told about the controversy and had to learn about it from RTÉ.

The main focus now needed is reassuring women who had used the CervicalCheck service, he said, adding that he feared that “something was lost in translation” and people seemed to think that a diagnosis had been withheld from women.

He pointed out that the audit review was triggered after a cancer diagnosis.

The outsourcing of testing had occurred in a bid to deal with a backlog as there had been incidents of delays of up to a year, he said. Mr O’Brien maintained that concerns raised by Dr David Gibbons had been addressed, “just not in the way he wanted.

“The current situation is that all the laboratories being used by CervicalCheck are in accordance with best international standards.”

However, he said this issue is about the communications process around the audit, it is not about laboratory performance. “CervicalCheck set out to do a good thing, but it failed in its execution.”

On the question of doctors not informing their patients, Mr O’Brien said he suspected the issue was that “nobody wanted to be the bearer of bad news and felt it would be better if there was a closed loop system.

“Nobody said the patient shouldn’t be told. It was a case of who tells the patient.”

He added that he was unambiguously in favour of a mandatory duty of care to disclose information to patients.

Any liability that will arise from an error outside the acceptable margin of error rests with the service provider, he said, which in this case is the laboratories. He did not know how this would impact on any future redress scheme.