The country of Ireland has a national cervical cancer screening program known as CervicalCheck that has recently been in the limelight for its notorious failure.

This cervical cancer screening program led to the demise of 18 women who received negative results from regularly scheduled pap smears due to laboratory error, according to a Jezebel article.

The cervical cancer screening should have picked up signs of abnormal precancerous cellular activity in these 18 women. But instead, the patients were led to believe they were perfectly healthy until their cancer was so advanced it was untreatable. They were not the only ones.

After a cervical cancer screening lawsuit was filed by Vicki P. in which she alleges gross mismanagement by the Irish Health Service Executive and a U.S. laboratory contracted to screen her pap smear, systemic errors were brought to light creating a public relations nightmare.

As the story of the lawsuit progressed, a four-year period between 2010 and 2014 was discovered to have produced at minimum 208 false negative pap smear tests when the associated cervical cancer screening should have picked up signs of cancer.

If the tests had been performed correctly, the women would have been subjected to a more advanced battery of tests to follow-up. Instead, only about a quarter of the 208 were even informed of the false readings. The errors were largely covered up. The 18 deaths were from this group of 208.

Vicki’s Perspective

Vicki P.’s cancer is currently inoperable, but if her 2011 false negative error had been revealed even as soon as the error had been found, this might have not been the case.

Vicki was finally told about the false negative test result one year and three months after the cervical cancer screening error was found. She was quoted as telling CNN that, “If I had been told this information sooner, two years ago, that my cancer was two years older than I knew it to be, I would have been insistent on a lot more scans”.

Changes Afoot

After the news of this lawsuit and its subsequent findings were made public, Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar initiated an investigation into the cervical cancer screening errors. He also made a public pronouncement of apology to the people of Ireland.

The results of the investigation have sparked genuine conversation about changing the methodology of cervical cancer screening in the small country. According to Jezebel, Ireland is moving its CervicalCheck program to primary HPV screenings which purportedly help identify cancerous activity on the cervix much earlier than Pap smears.

Meanwhile, the Health Service Executive is doing some extensive investigative backtracking to determine the cause of the immense failure rate of their previous cervical cancer screening program. Part of the investigation involves the examination of the multi-lab approach to processing which included two medical labs in-country and one located in the U.S.

Each pap smear requires close examination with the expertly-trained eye of a medical technician. It is unlike other diagnostic procedures which can be processed by a computer or other equipment.