A NORTH Galway general practitioner has said that she is not participating in the new national cervical cancer screening programme.
Dr Mary Rogan, who practises in Annaghdown, told The Irish Timesthat she was unhappy with the contract negotiated for the service by the Irish Medical Organisation (IMO).
She is also critical of the closure of the cytology laboratory in University College Hospital, Galway (UCHG). "We had a perfectly good laboratory in UCHG, which would have done this smear testing, and it has been shut down."
Dr Rogan, who has 600 medical card patients and about 1,000 private patients on her books, is now offering her patients a smear-test service, using a Dublin-based laboratory. Cost for the entire service is about €95.
This laboratory - Claymon in Sandyford, Dublin - said it was "completely inundated" by calls from general practitioners (GPs) seeking its cervical smear-testing services on behalf of patients.
The National Cancer Screening Service said last month that more than 1,100 GPs had signed up for the new smear-taker contract, while a further 400 were waiting for their contracts to be approved.
The programme began on a pilot basis in the midwest in August, and on a national basis on September 1st, with tests being sent to Quest Diagnostics in the United States.
Quest Diagnostics was initially hired by the Health Service Executive (HSE) two years ago to clear a six-month backlog of pap/smear tests waiting to be screened.
The IMO said that initial figures for the uptake of the programme were "not yet known, as test results had not come back from Quest Diagnostics's laboratory in the US".
The CervicalCheck website received more than 10,000 hits in its first week, with women trying to register for the scheme, it said.
The IMO has acknowledged that there were "initial delays" between GP contracts being approved and practices receiving their testing kits, but said that these had been "largely dealt with".
However, Dr Rogan said the medical organisation's decision to accept "yet another contract" without negotiating a new contract for all services was "inadequate" and took no cognisance of the fact that costs had risen since the original contract was agreed.
Claymon Laboratories sales and marketing director Mark McKeever said that some general practitioners who had contacted the company to use its cytology services had said that they were unhappy with the level of insurance currently offered to GPs.
Others said they were just not participating in the national screening scheme.
The fact that the scheme does not cover women under the age of 25 years had also been cited as an issue, he said.
Claymon Laboratories, which employs 70 people, opened in 1991 and provides a range of diagnostic pathology services. It is accredited to the new medical testing standard ISO 15189.
It stated that it had 1,200 general practitioners listed on its database - a number of whom have used its cytology service which was initiated three years ago.