By Vivienne Clarke
Professor Ann O’Doherty, the clinical director of the BreastCheck screening service, has said it will be months before the service is back to normal because of the huge challenges it faces.
It will take months to get back to normal because of backlogs in the symptomatic service she told Newstalk Breakfast.
Clinical services in hospitals have lost months of activity, and despite this there have been fewer cancers diagnosed, pointed out Prof. O’Doherty.
“There are a lot of women out there with lumps who are afraid at the moment, and we're encouraging them to come in.”
It now takes twice as long to do half the work, she added. “We're nothing like as productive as we would be in the normal environment. We have to catch up.”
Prof. O’Doherty said that at the beginning of the pandemic there was a determined effort to ensure hospitals were empty and not to generate unnecessary surgery.
Screening healthy women and bringing them into hospital during an epidemic was not a good idea.
“A lot of our women are up towards 69 - the age at which they should be cocooning. The first week of the pandemic all of our staff were in and we were looking after those women.
“Then the next thing was there were women with lumps who we couldn't look after in the hospitals. We actually changed, for the first time ever since the foundation of the screening programme, to look after women with symptoms.
“While screening is absolutely vital, it's healthy women and if women come for screening we can reduce the number of women dying in this country by 20%. But as against that, there is a risk to healthy women - so it's a matter of balancing risk and productivity.
“The bottom line is our doors are open for anybody with symptoms. We're doing our very best. We will get back to screening as soon as we possibly can.”
