A THREAT of industrial action by medical laboratory scientists at hospitals across the State will be discussed at their annual general meeting this weekend.
Their concern is that a number of public hospital laboratories have been turned down for reporting on smear tests to be taken under the national cervical cancer screening programme, due to be rolled out later in the year.
They are especially worried the work may be outsourced to the US as happened last year when backlogs of smear tests were sent abroad by the Health Service Executive (HSE) to be cleared, and that this could jeopardise the work they are now doing and their jobs.
Meanwhile, a letter seen by The Irish Timesindicates the faculty of pathology at the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland (RCPI) has "serious reservations" with regard to the possible outsourcing of the analysis on smear tests to the US.
The letter, sent to the National Cancer Screening Service (NCSS) last week by Dr Conor O'Keane, vice-dean of the faculty of pathology at the RCPI, says the outsourcing would have "many negative consequences for patients and for future pathology training".
He wrote that Quest Laboratories in the US - to which smears were previously outsourced by the HSE - use a system where women with negative smears have them repeated annually. But he said in the Republic the plan was to only repeat negative smears every three years.
Furthermore, he said recent outsourcing of smears to Quest had resulted in "significantly fewer" high-grade lesions being reported "than in parallel slide populations screened in Irish laboratories".
The fact lab workers in the US looked at twice as many slides per day may account for this difference, he suggested.
To combine elements of the two systems - the one in the US and the Republic - was "fundamentally flawed from a quality point of view and may lead to an increase in cervical cancer and mortality rates", he argued.
The public hospital laboratories already turned down by the NCSS for work on the upcoming national cervical screening programme include those at University College Hospital in Galway as well as St Luke's hospital, St James's Hospital and the Coombe Women's Hospital in Dublin.
However, the tendering process is not yet complete and a couple of Irish laboratories - including the ones at Beaumont and the RCSI - appear to be still in the running.
The NCSS said an announcement of successful tenders would be made shortly. It required laboratories to have full accreditation and a 10-day turn-around time for reporting on smears before they could take part in the national programme.
Terry Casey, general secretary of the Medical Laboratory Scientists Association (MLSA) which holds its agm in Kilkenny on Saturday, confirmed a number of motions expressed alarm at what was happening. One urges the MLSA to challenge the NCSS decision to exclude Irish laboratories from the cervical cancer screening programme, and to vigorously oppose outsourcing of these services to private enterprises abroad.
Another, he confirmed, urges the MLSA to consider industrial action if the service is outsourced.
Mr Casey said the MLSA could not understand the rationale for the decision to turn down a number of Irish laboratories which were close to receiving accreditation later this year.
He added there were about 70 medical scientists working in cytology in the State and they were worried about their jobs.