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Child Item

Smear Test Scandal

Sam Quentin

So are we about to have another enquiry?
It's already taking up valuable time in the Dail,.. with the 'opposition' parties shouting and blaming everyone but themselves!? When at the end of the day nobody as such is to blame, nothing is fool proof.. Cant we just be glad that the smear tests globally have saved millions of lives.....

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road_high

maxwell smart wrote: »

Was agreed in principle and the property wasn't in Kerry. Was near where she is from.
You know she got 7.5m and it was clear that she didn't have long left? So the seller thought she would just throw money at the place as it was perfect for her needs.
I've seen plenty of houses in Dublin go up well after the seller has 'agreed' to sell the place to someone, only to be outbid. That's how the property market works.

Thousands of properties for sale around the country. If someone wants to try pull a fast one you give them the two fingers.
Once sale agreed and a deposit is paid you enter into a contract whereby the price can't increase beyond the agreed. You can't be outbid as the process has ended. I'm not a legal person but pretty sure one can't hike up a price thereafter (closure of bids).

pansophelia

McCrack wrote: »

No in the cases of the 221 women identified the smears were indeed misread and the State and Quest Diagnostics have admitted liability in many of the cases brought. There would not have been settlements otherwise.

In Ms mhic mhathunas case they misread her smears not once but twice.

We have no evidence at the moment that the 221 were outside the normal error rate. We are waiting for the enquiry from the RCOG which is going to establish this.
I don’t think the labs have admitted liability in many of the cases?

Uriel.

pansophelia wrote: »

We have no evidence at the moment that the 221 were outside the normal error rate. We are waiting for the enquiry from the RCOG which is going to establish this.
I don’t think the labs have admitted liability in many of the cases?

And the state hasn't admitted liability to errors in the testing process. Though it certainly looks likely that it will, though not because it is actually liable.

tretorn

Report in Irish Times today saying that agreement on indemnityfor US labs has to be agreed by the weekend or else they will refuse to test any more samples from Ireland.
The lab position is compensation should only be paid if negligence in reading smear samples is established and they state that Irish courts are quicker to establish negligence than Courts in other jurisdictions.
The Scally report said the errors in the Irish cases are no higher than anywhere else so why these million euro payouts. Scally went even further and reported that samples should continue to be sent to the US labs we are now using so thats a vote of confidence in them.
Where does this leave the other women who got false negative results and who then developed cancer. If there was no negligence here either and errors within the normal range then really there should be no compensation paid but now that a precedent was set by paying someone seven million euros how can you not give the other two hundred women seven million too.
It looks like the HSE may have to stump up all future compensation and we dont know how much they have paid to date of the almost ten million awarded to two women and how much the US labs paid.
I actually think cervicalcheck should be disbanded now, the lawyers have eyed up this gravy train and Irish people are very litigious. There is no way a programme like this which was set up to spot warning signs in cells should ever had ended up costing millions in payouts. It would be better now if women access these tests privately with a warning attached as to how high the error rate is and the companies providing the tests protected by disclaimers should an acceptable number of errors occur. No system with any human input can ever be error free and everyone undergoing smears has to acept that.

Uriel.

tretorn wrote: »

Report in Irish Times today saying that agreement on indemnityfor US labs has to be agreed by the weekend or else they will refuse to test any more samples from Ireland.
The lab position is compensation should only be paid if negligence in reading smear samples is established and they state that Irish courts are quicker to establish negligence than Courts in other jurisdictions.
The Scally report said the errors in the Irish cases are no higher than anywhere else so why these million euro payouts. Scally went even further and reported that samples should continue to be sent to the US labs we are now using so thats a vote of confidence in them.
Where does this leave the other women who got false negative results and who then developed cancer. If there was no negligence here either and errors within the normal range then really there should be no compensation paid but now that a precedent was set by paying someone seven million euros how can you not give the other two hundred women seven million too.
It looks like the HSE may have to stump up all future compensation and we dont know how much they have paid to date of the almost ten million awarded to two women and how much the US labs paid.
I actually think cervicalcheck should be disbanded now, the lawyers have eyed up this gravy train and Irish people are very litigious. There is no way a programme like this which was set up to spot warning signs in cells should ever had ended up costing millions in payouts. It would be better now if women access these tests privately with a warning attached as to how high the error rate is and the companies providing the tests protected by disclaimers should an acceptable number of errors occur. No system with any human input can ever be error free and everyone undergoing smears has to acept that.

I doubt the political system will allow it to collapse, but it's going to become extremely expensive for the tax payer to keep the show on the road.

You talk about the legals eyeing up the gravy train. It comes as no surprise. The media and politicians gave so much air time and access to Cian O'Carrol (and still are, todays Examiner) as if he was some sort of objective expert analyst. He's a feckin solicitor that will earn a fortune out of the issue and he was allowed to essentially make the legal arguments he's make in court over the National airwaves. Its mad.

tretorn

I know uriel, he has no medical training and now he is saying that we need a cervical screening system that will be totally error free.
There is no such system anywhere in the world. I doubt if seven million euro would be paid out in any other jurisdiction in the world, is there any precedent for sums like this in cervical test screening.
Ms McMathuna went on the airwaves and after that no Minister was going to stand up and point out the facts.
This is really poor Governance and we pay politicans large sums of money so surely we should expect some sort of leadership and not have the entire country lapping up sensationalist ramblings from the media. The Politicans who paid a major part in misleading the public should be held to account for what will now be a dismantling of cervical check which was actually under Grainne Flannelly and Tony o Brien a very successful programme.

The programme will collapse if the US labs refuse to do the testing and they sauy they are stopping this weekend unless agreement is reached about future compensation and who is to pay for it. The uS labs would never have agreed to test Irish samples if they knew they could be liable to pay millions in euros for errors. The HSE have said they have a plan B in place if the US labs pull out but they wont say what it is, this means they havent a clue what they are going to do, they have no choice but to agree with giving the US labs indemnity which means the irish taxpayer is going to have to fund multi million euro payouts for the other two hundred women who got false negative results. Thats only the women who have false negative results at the moment. Every woman who has got the all clear and then develops cancer will have an audit done of her test too. If any of these audits show early cells changes were there and not picked up then all these women can claim in the future too, the solicitors will be busy for ever more amen and counting the taxpayers money(legal costs) coming into their coffers.

[Deleted User]

Its a symptom of modern society the obsession with engineering a risk-free society there is no such thing, sometimes with the best will in the world things happen and its nobody's fault.

The second issue is our greedy legal system apparently the legal system was all over various screening programs as soon as this issue was flagged.

tretorn

And yes, the legal eagles are all over this.

The bowel screening and Breast cancer mammograms will be next.

The Government will have to stop all free screening.

I met a legal eagle at the weekend, she works in medical negligence cases and she was spouting all about women having cancer and not being told about it and how much they should be compensated. The more they are compensated the more she earns so she is hardly objective.

marieholmfan

Simon Harris wants to be Taoiseach and if that costs €100 million so be it. No one will accuse him of running the clock for women to die if he has anything to do with it.

[Deleted User]

marieholmfan wrote: »

Simon Harris wants to be Taoiseach and if that costs €100 million so be it. No one will accuse him of running the clock for women to die if he has anything to do with it.

Simon comes across as a bit softhearted at times, guaranteeing that no woman would have to go to court now they are not bad qualities but don't work in politics.

marieholmfan

mariaalice wrote: »

Simon comes across as a bit softhearted at times, guaranteeing that no woman would have to go to court now they are not bad qualities but don't work in politics.

It will work. It isn't his money. If everyone in Ireland has to pay €50 to a group of dying women and Simon keeps his hopes for the top job alive he would be mad not to pay it; and he will.

PlaneSpeeking

Genuine point and try not to all jump on me at the same time - but if this was a male cancer "scandal" there is no way it would have got as much traction, publicity, sympathy or payout.

And deep down in places you don't like to talk about at parties, you know that.

[Deleted User]

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

Genuine point and try not to all jump on me at the same time - but if this was a male cancer "scandal" there is no way it would have got as much traction, publicity, sympathy or payout.

And deep down in places you don't like to talk about at parties, you know that.

What a silly post the woman particularly Vicky Phelan advocated for themselves and got in touch with the media there is nothing to stop men advocating for themselves if a similar issue happened and the media would be very receptive they love combinations of blaming the pharmacy industry/goverement/ HSE combined with something tragic.

Do you really think a dying father would not generate a lot of publicity?

RebelButtMunch

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

Genuine point and try not to all jump on me at the same time - but if this was a male cancer "scandal" there is no way it would have got as much traction, publicity, sympathy or payout.

And deep down in places you don't like to talk about at parties, you know that.

Probably the worst most disingenuous post on the thread. Have some respect for the thread gravity. How about you take that male vs female tragedy topic to a separate thread.

joe40

If a government or health service is providing a screening service it makes good economic sense as well as "morally" to have the system as accurate as possible.

It is a lot cheaper to treat pre cancer than actual cancer, so false negatives should be at an absolute minimum.

I do realise that no screening system is, or can be 100% accurate. Screening is not diagnosis, but we need to be certain screening systems we have are as robust as possible. It is money well spent, prevention and early diagnosis are cheaper in the long run.

There also has to be work done on educating people about the limitations of screening, no easy task when you then want to promote screening.

Communication is also key.

By the way is there any information available in relation to litigation of the US labs involved by US patients. I would have imagined big companies would not payout if there work and results was within quality control protocols. I know every wrong result is automatically negligence.

tretorn

The US is an entirely different country to us regarding litigation.

There is no way on earth a payout of seven million US dollars would have been made to one person, this is why the US labs dont want the Irish work anymore. They would have signed the contract for the work thinking the scheme would operate the same way as it does in the States, ie an acceptance that the tests are not diagnostic and nor can it ever be error free.

Doctor Scally reported that there werent higher errors with the tests carried out by the US labs. They would be seeing hundreds of samples so you would build up an expertise.

The time to educate the public was when this "scandal" broke. The HSE officials knew the immature Irish media would sensationalise and distort the facts to sell papers. hence the memo on how to deal with the predicted headlines. The only problem was the HSE did nothing to challenge these headlines and neither did the Government even though Leo Vradkar as a GP knew exactly what any independent report would come up with, eg the Scally report. Before this report was ready though the Government caved into public pressure and paid out millions in compensation, this country is a basket case, it always was but when you have senior politicans spending their days on social media and twitter you might as well whistle in the wind.

tretorn

And planespeaking is totally correct.

There is no way a male cancer would ever get the publicity this "scandal" has created.

The claims about a mysoginistic health service are so untrue is laughable. I have read reams and reams from feminist journalists about this but if you look at the gender base of the health service its predominately female. The numbers entering undergraduate degrees in medicine is approximately 7O per cent female and the nursing profession is predominately female. Most of the Physiotherapists, Radiographers, Dietiticans, you name it are all female and the only area thats predominately male is the hospital porter grade.

If journalists repeat their nonsense often enough their readers actually begin to believe this stuff.

PlaneSpeeking

tretorn wrote: »

And planespeaking is totally correct.

There is no way a male cancer would ever get the publicity this "scandal" has created.

The claims about a mysoginistic health service are so untrue is laughable. I have read reams and reams from feminist journalists about this but if you look at the gender base of the health service its predominately female. The numbers entering undergraduate degrees in medicine is approximately 7O per cent female and the nursing profession is predominately female. Most of the Physiotherapists, Radiographers, Dietiticans, you name it are all female and the only area thats predominately male is the hospital porter grade.

If journalists repeat their nonsense often enough their readers actually begin to believe this stuff.

Too busy peddling their agenda to actually open their eyes and see the real world.

Anyone really believing that the tabloids would fill front pages with Dermot from Cavan "leaving his babies behind", "sure they'll have no mammy" etc etc is deluded at best.

SusieBlue

It never fails to shock me that no matter what story is in the news, be it a health scandal, a government f*ck up, or a crisis, the threads on Boards always end up going full circle back to how men have it worse than women, and how oppressed they are.
Regardless of the topic. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

PlaneSpeeking

SusieBlue wrote: »

It never fails to shock me that no matter what story is in the news, be it a health scandal, a government f*ck up, or a crisis, the threads on Boards always end up going full circle back to how men have it worse than women, and how oppressed they are.
Regardless of the topic. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

I'm a woman, and the fact is true.

Sorry to take the victim mantle away but, there you have it.

SusieBlue

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

I'm a woman, and the fact is true.

Sorry to take the victim mantle away but, there you have it.

Those women are victims. Turning this thread into a women V men debacle is in very poor taste.
I'm sure if a single father died after receiving incorrect cancer screening results, everyone would be up in arms too, and concerned for the welfare of the poor children left behind without their main caregiver.

I recall when Jason Corbett was murdered by his wife, there was plenty of sympathy and concern (both here and online) for the children he had left behind. Nobody dismissed how tragic it was just because he was a man and father.

PlaneSpeeking

SusieBlue wrote: »

Those women are victims. Turning this thread into a women V men debacle is in very poor taste.
I'm sure if a single father died after receiving incorrect cancer screening results, everyone would be up in arms too, and concerned for the welfare of the poor children left behind without their main caregiver.

I recall when Jason Corbett was murdered by his wife, there was plenty of sympathy and concern (both here and online) for the children he had left behind. Nobody dismissed how tragic it was just because he was a man and father.

Au contraire - plenty argued that he "should have fought back".

It was sickening to read.

SusieBlue

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

Au contraire - plenty argued that he "should have fought back".

It was sickening to read.

Not what I was implying or suggesting.

Anyone really believing that the tabloids would fill front pages with Dermot from Cavan "leaving his babies behind", "sure they'll have no mammy" etc etc is deluded at best.

I'm talking about the concern for the children being left without their father - I'm sure you'll agree that there was universal support and concern left for the children without their father, despite the fact that was he male and not a mother.

marieholmfan

Most cancers kill the old which is not important.
Cervical cancer kills women of child rearing age.

It kills the mothers of children.
Other cancers kill the mothers of adults.

Cervical cancer is different.

Banned

tretorn wrote: »

And planespeaking is totally correct.

There is no way a male cancer would ever get the publicity this "scandal" has created.

The claims about a mysoginistic health service are so untrue is laughable. I have read reams and reams from feminist journalists about this but if you look at the gender base of the health service its predominately female. The numbers entering undergraduate degrees in medicine is approximately 7O per cent female and the nursing profession is predominately female. Most of the Physiotherapists, Radiographers, Dietiticans, you name it are all female and the only area thats predominately male is the hospital porter grade.

If journalists repeat their nonsense often enough their readers actually begin to believe this stuff.

marieholmfan

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

I'm a woman, and the fact is true.

Sorry to take the victim mantle away but, there you have it.

Everyone is a dog on the internet.

PlaneSpeeking

marieholmfan wrote: »

Most cancers kill the old which is not important.
Cervical cancer kills women of child rearing age.

It kills the mothers of children.
Other cancers kill the mothers of adults.

Cervical cancer is different.

Lung cancer killed my grandfather when he had four children from 15 to 10.

Your first post - bold - is disgusting and worth reporting.

marieholmfan

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

Lung cancer killed my grandfather when he had four children from 15 to 10.

Prove it.

marieholmfan

PlaneSpeeking wrote: »

Your first post - bold - is disgusting and worth reporting.

Everybody has to die sometime and everyone has to die of something.

Dying at 80 is very very different from dying at 40.

Amirani

SusieBlue wrote: »

It never fails to shock me that no matter what story is in the news, be it a health scandal, a government f*ck up, or a crisis, the threads on Boards always end up going full circle back to how men have it worse than women, and how oppressed they are.
Regardless of the topic. If it wasn't so sad it would be funny.

In fairness, various elements of the media have been claiming the opposite; i.e. that the Cervical check scandal is an example of the health service caring less about women. Both sides do be at it.

https://www.independent.ie/irish-news/health/men-do-not-face-these-types-of-scandals-is-womens-health-just-taken-less-seriously-36865249.html

"Men do not face these types of scandals – is women’s health just taken less seriously?"

https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/nuns-and-prostitutes-ireland-s-hopeless-attitude-to-women-s-health-1.3628359

"As the Scally report made clear last week, society might have moved on, but some things haven’t changed. Much of what was in the report we might have expected. Women’s health services are still secondary, as those working in the maternity services have been warning for years."

joe40

tretorn wrote: »

The US is an entirely different country to us regarding litigation.

There is no way on earth a payout of seven million US dollars would have been made to one person, this is why the US labs dont want the Irish work anymore. They would have signed the contract for the work thinking the scheme would operate the same way as it does in the States, ie an acceptance that the tests are not diagnostic and nor can it ever be error free.

Doctor Scally reported that there werent higher errors with the tests carried out by the US labs. They would be seeing hundreds of samples so you would build up an expertise.

The time to educate the public was when this "scandal" broke. The HSE officials knew the immature Irish media would sensationalise and distort the facts to sell papers. hence the memo on how to deal with the predicted headlines. The only problem was the HSE did nothing to challenge these headlines and neither did the Government even though Leo Vradkar as a GP knew exactly what any independent report would come up with, eg the Scally report. Before this report was ready though the Government caved into public pressure and paid out millions in compensation, this country is a basket case, it always was but when you have senior politicans spending their days on social media and twitter you might as well whistle in the wind.

I can actually agree with most of your post, but I still find it hard to believe why an American lab would pay compensation to Vicky Phelan if their work was up to standard. Everyone knows a false negative does not necessarily imply negligence on the part of the Lab. So why pay compensation.
This was the lab not the Irish government.

I do agree the narrative got heated and to be brutally frank too simplistic. This is in no way to take away from the pain and suffering of the individuals involved but cancer is a fact of life, it will occur with devastating consequences. Screening will not prevent every case.

But seriously there is no need to turn this into a male/female thing that is just ridiculous.

There is a debate to be had about how this was handled, but we also need to be sure screening programmes are as good as they can be. As I said 100% accuracy will not be achieved but that should not stop us strifing for the best possible system.
Maybe the system we use is fit for purpose and equivalent to other countries in terms of quality control, but no harm in getting that confirmed.