A national cervical cancer screening programme will finally be put in place later this year, it was confirmed yesterday.
Tony O'Brien, chief executive of the National Cancer Screening Service, said the programme - unlike BreastCheck - would be extended to all areas of the country at the same time. It will begin after November 1st, he added.
Women aged 25 to 44 years will be screened at three-yearly intervals and women aged 45 to 60 years will be recalled every five years for smear tests, he said.
Some of the smears may have to be "outsourced" for analysis to ensure results get back to women within four weeks, he added. At present the HSE is outsourcing some smear tests to the US.
Mr O'Brien said a number of critical issues are being worked on at present in advance of the expansion of the national cervical screening programme.
These included ensuring adequate turn-around times for cervical smear testing, ensuring mechanisms were in place to have an 80 per cent take-up, and ensuring facilities were in place for appropriate follow-ups for women with abnormal test results.
"At the moment we are putting all of those relevant ingredients in place in a quality assured way so that the programme can be rolled out as a single event on a national basis," he said.
"We are working towards what you might call a big bang approach," he added.
Meanwhile, he said the full introduction nationwide of BreastCheck to areas such as the west and northwest will happen in October. "The programme will have national coverage by October but because it's a two-yearly cycle not all women can expect to be called in October," he explained.
His comments came at an international cancer conference in Dublin organised by St James's Hospital where Prof Peter Sasieni of the Cancer Research Centre at Bartholomews and the Royal London School of Medicine, said it was "a shame" a national cervical cancer screening programme had not been put in place in the Republic earlier.
He said thousands of women had lost their lives to cervical cancer in the UK because screening was not introduced until 1988, which was about 20 years after Finland. Many lives would also have been lost in the Republic as a result of the delay, he added. Up to 200 new cases are diagnosed in the Republic every year.