Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 24 June 2021
As I said in my statement, around 500 people—I think that it is 434—have been contacted this week. However, because of the range of errors involved, we think that it is prudent to go back and examine the records of all women who have had hysterectomies to ensure that no errors have occurred. That means that the number of women who might be involved could be larger.
I said in my statement that the number is about 170,000 women; however, bearing in mind that the vast majority of women who have hysterectomies in Scotland have total hysterectomies, we expect that the vast majority of those women will have been correctly excluded. I know that it is uncomfortable to have to wait to be contacted, but we are working as fast as we can to resolve the issue.
In relation to additional resources, around 200 women have been asked to attend their general practitioners for a screening. I do not expect that to produce an undue burden on general practices; very few will have more than one woman involved. In relation to the two groups of women who have been called, had their letters and been given an appointment at the hospital, we have provided extra resources to several health boards who wanted to put on additional clinics to ensure that that did not impact on the services that are currently being provided.
On invasive cancer audits, the new national methodology was introduced in 2014. Health boards were doing audits before that. I can say only that no cases were found through that national audit system until 2020.