Eight women developed cancer after smear test misread, says report

Eight women whose smear tests were misread by screeners went on to develop cancer, a major review into cervical screening at the Southern Health Trust has found.

A further 11 women's slides were found to have pre-cancerous changes in the cells when they were reviewed and had to receive treatment.

All these women had either pre-cancerous changes to their cervix or were diagnosed with another significant gynaecological condition when their smears were reviewed.

The Southern Health Trust has apologised to all those affected.

The review was triggered when the diagnoses of three women were investigated as a Serious Adverse Incident.

Two of the women, Lynsey Courtney and Erin Harbinson, have since died.

More than 17,000 were approached to have their smear tests rechecked.

The examination of cancer screening at the Southern Health Trust over 13 years found that many women were failed after some screeners underperformed and went unchecked by management for years.

Stella McLoughlin from the campaign group Ladies with Letters described what had happened as unforgivable and called for a public inquiry.

"This has been an absolute scandal from start to finish and was allowed to go on for 10 years," she added.

"Smears being misread, people not being held to account, screeners not being managed properly - all of this is affecting real people."

The review of cervical screening in the trust looked at two different groups of women.

The first looked at the cases of 207 women who had previously been diagnosed with cervical cancer.

The eight women who went on to develop cancer had their slides reviewed in this cohort.

The review found that if their tests had been read correctly they could have been diagnosed and treated earlier.

The second group included 17,425 women who were asked to return to have their smears rechecked.

The 11 women who are currently undergoing non-cancerous treatment were part of this group.

The trust said it could not be concluded that the eight women had developed cancer because abnormalities on their smear tests were missed.

The highly critical Royal College of Pathology report found a "persistent failure " to tackle underperformance by some cervical screening staff.

It said policies for dealing with poor performance were below standard and the screening laboratory was not sustainable.

Action taken by management was inadequate over many years, said the college.

For all of the review period 2008 – 2021, Northern Ireland used cytology-based screening which involves making a slide from the smear test sample and looking at it under a microscope.

Cytology screening only detects about three in four abnormalities.

In December 2023, Northern Ireland caught up with the rest of the UK when it introduced primary HPV screening which tests for the presence of a human papillomavirus (HPV) which is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer.

This is a more sensitive screening method and is expected to find nine out of 10 abnormalities.

The findings will now undergo an independent expert review, with work on this to commence imminently by Allan Wilson, a senior biomedical scientist at NHS Lanarkshire. He has more than 45 years experience of working on the cervical screening programme in Scotland.

Based on those findings, the health minister will decide whether to launch a public inquiry.