The Health Service Executive has said that negotiations are at a "critical stage" with laboratories which provide screening for the national CervicalCheck programme.
The contracts end in mid-October.
The HSE said that negotiations have been ongoing for a number of weeks in relation to the extension of the current contracts.
It said that every effort is being made to ensure continuity of the screening service, which deals with around 300,000 tests a year.
Some of the laboratories want the State to indemnify them, particularly against cases where there are false negatives, which may or may not be within a margin of acceptable error.
Some laboratories are understood to have indicated they cannot secure insurance for this work.
Laboratories are also experiencing a backlog of work.
After the CervicalCheck crisis emerged, the Government said all women who underwent a CervicalCheck could have free repeat screening.
It has led to a surge of repeat tests and has caused a backlog in some of the laboratories.
Laboratories had been able to deal with the backlog by outsourcing tests elsewhere in the US and in the UK.
However RTÉ News has learned that problems have arisen as other laboratories are declining to take the overflow work, due to the risks exposed by the CervicalCheck crisis.
This is affecting the turnaround times for some tests.
CervicalCheck uses three laboratories, two of them are in Ireland - MedLab Pathology Ltd, Dublin and the Coombe Women and Infant's Hospital, Dublin.
One of the laboratories is in the US - Quest Diagnostics Inc, Teterboro, New Jersey.
MedLab and Quest handle almost 90% of the total screening work.
Meanwhile, Dr Gabriel Scally has briefed Minister for Health Sim on Harris on his review of the CervicalCheck crisis.
They also discussed arrangements to brief the women and their families on the contents of the report, prior to publication, according to the Department of Health.
The report was delivered to the Department of Health last Friday evening and has been forwarded to the Attorney General, prior for its submission to Government and publication, which is expected to take place on Wednesday.
