Debate contribution: Women's Health Strategy

Debate contribution by Mrs Diane Dodds on 13 February 2024.

MLA

Mrs Diane Dodds

Party at the time

Democratic Unionist Party

Date

13 February 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Women's Health Strategy

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4206202

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Mr Deputy Speaker, I offer you my congratulations on your new post. I thank the Minister for coming to respond to the debate. As a new member of the Health Committee, I look forward to working with you and holding you to account but, I hope, working constructively on the important things that we do. I offer support for the motion and the amendment. These are extremely important issues. As the Member who spoke previously said, at times, they offer an uncomfortable truth about the state of services for women's health in Northern Ireland. On a broad level, I welcome the motion as appropriate and necessary. I will make a few remarks at the outset and, then, address a very specific issue in relation to women's health. In this House, we are very fond of talking about strategies. We talked about a strategy yesterday, and, no doubt, we will talk about another next week, but what we actually need is action. Strategies take years to develop and money to implement, but that is no reason not to have action in the meantime. Minister, if you hear nothing else today, I hope that you hear that loud and clear. I also want to acknowledge that it is important that we look at the link between deprivation, poverty and poor health, particularly for women and, indeed, for families. We need to have a strategy that does not just copy other strategies but is pretty much joined-up and quite specific: that is very important. In the remainder of my time today, I want to focus on an issue that has impacted on 17,000 women in the Southern Trust area of Northern Ireland, which is the review of cervical smears. These smears are from the period 1 January 2008 to October 2021 and have impacted on 17,000 women who have had letters telling them that they are part of that review and that they may or may not need further action. That has caused huge amounts of worry and poses really important questions as to how we deal with those health issues for women. Before I get any further into the issues, may I just say that the trust is doing some amazing work in relation to this. It has gone out of its way to help, but fantastic work is also being done in the community and support is being given in the community. Last week, the trust came to the all-party group on cancer and answered some questions on this matter, which was very helpful. However, this is something that has been known about for some considerable time and, if I have written down the figures correctly from the information that was given at the all-party group last week, to date only 1,740 slides have been reviewed and only 1,084 letters have been issued. Progress has been incredibly slow on this matter and, for some people, it will be a matter of life and death: it is massively important. I am asking the Minister today to take charge of the matter and make sure that the trust and, indeed, other trusts, have the capacity to speed up that process. In closing — I do not want to go over my time too much, with your indulgence, Mr Deputy Speaker — there are things that some of those women have asked me to mention specifically in relation to their tests. Many of those women will want to see the review procedure conducted fully, including not just their HPV status but the cytology behind their tests. Many of them want to know what the process is —.

Of course I will.

I thank the Minister. I appreciate that this is something that the trust and the Department should take and have taken very seriously. However, a number of issues are still outstanding. We have a remarkably low uptake of appointments in relation to the cervical screening.

Yes. We need to address that particular issue. We also need to address the issue of assurance for screeners in future. The national performance level for that is 90%, but the Southern Trust adopted a lower performance level.

Minister, you need to ensure, and we need to hear from your Department, that that performance level is reviewed and kept at an appropriate level.

715 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

Not qualifying

Jev’s structured answers

Assessed 21 October 2026 at 09:35 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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