I strongly believe a very serious campaign needs to be launched to help with understanding screening. It does incredible good for select illnesses and is a huge net positive for cancers where the evidence is robust to support it.
It isn’t infallible. There WILL be missed cases, even if the very highest standards are applied. Ireland has to become extremely tough on this. It’s shit when screening doesn’t catch a developing cancer or a cancer rapidly develops between two screening periods, but if it is being performed to the highest standards and that is shown, there cannot be legal claims against the service. That needs to be defended at a societal level because there is a very real risk that we will lose some excellent screening services which hurts all of us.
“This is because “either the public no longer have confidence in screening and no longer participate” or staff do not want to work in a service that has “high levels of litigation”.”
Maybe if the standard of service was increased we wouldn’t blame others for our own problems. You have to laugh at their approach to anything they do wrong.
Its not the missed diagnoses, it’s the attitude of Tony Holohan and his likenesses toward the general public that’s put everything at risk.
Shame on them.
You can’t even say dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good because there is no perfect screening program.
It’s not possible to catch every single incidence of disease across a population. No screening program can do it. It doesn’t work like that.
And if you try to raise the bar to catch say, 99.99% of the incidences, what tends to happen is you will get a massive increase in the rate of false positives which causes a whole rake of other problems and anxiety for people who never had the disease.
Yes every missed diagnosis could lead to a tragedy for that individual , but these are the real world trade-offs we need to make for successful screening programs that have to balance a fixed budget vs cost, frequency.of testing, specificity, ability to treat a given disease and many other factors.
“Oh no! Our services are so shite due to the government purposefully driving it into the ground that people are suing what could we do to make this not happen?”
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I strongly believe a very serious campaign needs to be launched to help with understanding screening. It does incredible good for select illnesses and is a huge net positive for cancers where the evidence is robust to support it.
It isn’t infallible. There WILL be missed cases, even if the very highest standards are applied. Ireland has to become extremely tough on this. It’s shit when screening doesn’t catch a developing cancer or a cancer rapidly develops between two screening periods, but if it is being performed to the highest standards and that is shown, there cannot be legal claims against the service. That needs to be defended at a societal level because there is a very real risk that we will lose some excellent screening services which hurts all of us.
“This is because “either the public no longer have confidence in screening and no longer participate” or staff do not want to work in a service that has “high levels of litigation”.”
Maybe if the standard of service was increased we wouldn’t blame others for our own problems. You have to laugh at their approach to anything they do wrong.
Its not the missed diagnoses, it’s the attitude of Tony Holohan and his likenesses toward the general public that’s put everything at risk.
Shame on them.
You can’t even say dont let the perfect be the enemy of the good because there is no perfect screening program.
It’s not possible to catch every single incidence of disease across a population. No screening program can do it. It doesn’t work like that.
And if you try to raise the bar to catch say, 99.99% of the incidences, what tends to happen is you will get a massive increase in the rate of false positives which causes a whole rake of other problems and anxiety for people who never had the disease.
Yes every missed diagnosis could lead to a tragedy for that individual , but these are the real world trade-offs we need to make for successful screening programs that have to balance a fixed budget vs cost, frequency.of testing, specificity, ability to treat a given disease and many other factors.
“Oh no! Our services are so shite due to the government purposefully driving it into the ground that people are suing what could we do to make this not happen?”