A total of 385 claims have been brought against the CervicalCheck screening programme, according to figures from the State Claims Agency (SCA).
The figure represents all those received as of June 1st this year and includes psychological claims brought by family members.
The SCA said it could not give a definite figure as to the number of cases regarding CervicalCheck which have been settled, given the nature of the cases, explaining: “Some [cases] may be resolved by the laboratories or other third party and the SCA may not be privy to the outcome.”
However, the agency confirmed of the 385 claims received by the start of June 2023, 183 were active and not yet concluded at that point, while 202 had been concluded.
The SCA added that claims can be concluded by a number of means, including case settled, court award, indemnity received (from co-defendant or third party), claim discontinued or statute-barred, and claim initiated but not pursued.
“It should be noted that most of the claims have been settled by the laboratories involved in the individual claims and, accordingly, the agency does not, in all instances, have details of settlement payments made by those laboratories,” the SCA noted.
Sample audit
Many of these claims arose after it emerged that a number of smear tests carried out under the CervicalCheck screening programme had been misread, resulting in some women receiving false-negative results.
When the issue was identified, an audit of samples taken under the CervicalCheck programme was carried out. The slides of 221 women were found to have been misread, however, many of these women were not informed of the audit or that their results had been revised.
A number of women impacted by the issue have since died of cancer, including campaigners Emma Mhic Mhathúna, Ruth Morrissey and Vicky Phelan, all of whom took court actions against the HSE and the laboratories which read their respective samples.
In March 2019, just under a year after Ms Phelan’s High Court settlement shone a light on the matter, the Government established an ex-gratia scheme for those affected by the non-disclosure of the CervicalCheck audit.
“The scheme was designed to provide an alternative, non-adversarial and person-centred option for those affected by the CervicalCheck non-disclosure issue,” the Department of Health said.
Under the scheme, those affected received €20,000, which was deemed “the appropriate amount” by the independent assessment panel, which was chaired by Justice Aindrias Ó Caoimh. In contrast, the settlements or awards in the cases taken to court ranged in the millions.
Confirming that all the “221-cohort identified from the clinical audit as having discordance in their smear test result”, or their next of kin, were eligible to participate in the scheme, the department added that as of early June: “In total, 175 applications have been received and payments of €20,000 have been made in all cases.”
By Muireann Duffy
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