Health Minister Jennifer Carroll MacNeill has apologised to the family of a woman with incurable cancer after she received two inaccurate smear results.
On Tuesday, Leona Macken, 38, a mother of two young daughters, settled a High Court action against the HSE over failures in the CervicalCheck screening programme in 2016 and 2020.
Ms Macken's two smear checks failed to detect pre-cancerous abnormalities which directly resulted in her developing cervical cancer, the court heard.
In 2023 the hair stylist was diagnosed with stage three cervical cancer which has since progressed to stage four. Her legal action with the HSE was settled for an undisclosed sum.
On RTÉ's Morning Ireland on Wednesday, Ms Carroll MacNeill offered her apologies to Ms Macken and her family, saying: 'What you have here is a 38-year-old woman who has been impacted in this way, and so have her family, and that is what is important.'
Ms Macken was required to seek legal action to have her smear results investigated after she began to suspect that they had been misread.
'A screening programme will always have some limitations,' the minister added, though she said Ms Macken should not have had to 'fight' to have an audit of her results conducted.
Ms Carroll MacNeill acknowledged that anyone in a medical negligence case should have 'timely, open disclosure'.
'These are very clear cases, and it is really important people are not provided additional stress and hurt through a court process when some of the issues are very clear, and that has to change,' she said.
'There is a very different way we need to approach medical negligence cases and how they're treated, and that is one of the most important things I will be Concern: Ms Carroll MacNeill trying to address during the period that I am Minister for Health.'
Ms Macken's solicitor Cian O'Carroll said his client had stood outside the High Court 'seven years on from when Vicky Phelan stood in the exact same spot, and effectively nothing had changed', in terms of the way women are told about mistakes in their smear tests.
The minister also told Morning Ireland an audit would take place of waiting lists for children's hospitals, and said she understood parents would be concerned over a recent spending freeze.
The National Treatment Purchase Fund (NTPF), which pays for private treatment for people on long public waiting lists, said on Tuesday it would suspend funding to Children's Health Ireland (CHI) over concerns that a doctor allegedly breached HSE guidelines.
It was revealed last month that a hospital consultant was paid by the NTPF for referring patients he was seeing in his public practice to weekend clinics he was operating separately.
'We need to remove incentives that may create perversions of the kind that's described there,' said Ms Carroll MacNeill.
'The NTPF pause is appropriate, but it doesn't impact the procedures that have already been committed to.' Asked if children who have already been on long public waiting lists for months will be impacted by the funding suspension, the minister said: 'They may... I would ask parents to sit for a week or ten days to allow the NTPF to do its work.
'The NTPF is a very serious and professional organisation who will do their work quickly. What's really important is the concerns that they have.'
The minister explained that the body had expressed worries that children weren't receiving care earlier in the public system.
'My underlying issue is: how are these waiting lists being managed? HSE chief executive Bernard Gloster and I have decided to have an overall audit of the waiting lists in the CHI,' she said.
