Health

Screening chief says high level of CervicalCheck litigation poses threat to service

Fiona Murphy, the head of the National Screening Service, warns legal costs and liability fears put programmes at risk

Fiona Murphy, chief executive, National Screening Service: ‘the controversy at the time had a lot of misinformation about what happened’ Picture: Bryan Meade

Fiona Murphy remembers watching from afar as the 2018 CervicalCheck controversy unfolded in Ireland. At the time, she was working with the NHS in Scotland.

“People were shocked that you would get false negative results in screening, but the health professionals were shocked that people were shocked by that. It was a total misunderstanding of what to expect from screening. And therefore when an unexpected thing happened, it got blown up,” the now chief executive of the National Screening Service told the Business Post.