Sarah McMillan/cvnznews.com
38 Years After Cartwright: Women Are Still Being Failed by a Cervical Screening Register Not Fit for Purpose
Wednesday, 5 August, marked 38 years since Judge Silvia Cartwright released her landmark report into the treatment of cervical cancer at National Women’s Hospital. The Cartwright Inquiry was born out of a simple, devastating truth: women were not being told the truth about their health, and some were being used as unwitting subjects in an unethical “natural history” experiment. The Inquiry exposed systemic failures, secrecy, and a culture that dismissed women’s concerns — and it led directly to the creation of the National Cervical Screening Programme (NCSP) and the urgent call for a centralised, high‑quality register to ensure such abuses could never happen again.
Today, that promise lies in tatters.
An independent expert review commissioned by HealthNZ has revealed serious flaws in the new Cervical Screening Register:
- Nearly one million screening notifications were never sent to eligible women.
- No screening histories were properly transitioned into the new system.
- Recommendation mismatches between laboratories and the Register created unacceptable clinical risk.
For the Auckland Women’s Health Council, the Cartwright Collective, and the Federation of Women’s Health Councils Aotearoa, this is a chilling echo of history. The 2001 Gisborne Cervical Screening Inquiry found the register at the time was so dysfunctional that abnormal results were routinely reported as normal, leaving women — in the Inquiry’s own words — “severely injured.”
The entire point of a central register was to ensure this could never happen again. Yet here we are.
“It is appalling and beyond belief that 38 years on, and only three years after this Register was implemented, we have learned it went live with known flaws,” says Sue Claridge of the Auckland Women’s Health Council.
Frontline staff reportedly raised alarms before launch. HealthNZ proceeded anyway — in the middle of restructuring the National Public Health Service and disestablishing the National Screening Unit, hollowing out clinical leadership and destabilising the workforce.
Barbara Robson of the Federation of Women’s Health Councils is blunt: “This was a world‑leading change. The failures were inevitable.”
HealthNZ insists there is “not yet any indication of harm” in the 13,000 case reviews. But harm in cervical screening often emerges years later.
Equally troubling is the silence. The review began in October 2024, finished in June 2025 — and the public only learned of it through an investigative journalist.
Where is the accountability? Where is the transparency? Women deserve more than assurances. They deserve answers — now.
