Breast screening programme lags

Serious problems have been detected in the Government's $22-million-a-year breast screening programme.

A monitoring report obtained under the Official Information Act shows that low coverage rates could jeopardise the programme.

There is also concern about missing and inadequate data on women who may unknowingly have cancer, and unacceptable delays for follow-up tests.

The December report from the BreastScreen Aotearoa Independent Monitoring Group made a host of recommendations to the Ministry of Health and screening providers.

The programme, designed to save lives by detecting cancer early, had to screen 9 per cent of all eligible women every three months to meet its target of 70 per cent within two years, but was managing only 8 per cent, it said.

The shortfall could create problems in the next few months, when providers had to start their second round of checks on women screened two years ago, at the same time as completing their first screening round.

"Any increase in the length of the screening interval will decrease the ability of BreastScreen Aotearoa to reduce breast cancer mortality."

The report also expressed concern about women already enrolled in the programme who had been referred for assessment but not followed up despite their abnormal mammograms.

"There is no information about what happened to these women subsequently," it said.

Figures to July showed that 263 women had been referred for assessment but had not had results recorded. Some had their abnormal mammograms more than a year ago.

Stressing that women with abnormal mammograms might have breast cancer, the report said it was vital to find out what happened to all the women.

A failure to follow up on them would represent a failure of the national screening programme and would be unacceptable.

It was also of concern that none of the providers had reached the target of offering 90 per cent of women an assessment appointment within 14 working days of their final screening mammogram, the report said.

All providers recorded delays beyond the three-week target for offering women open biopsies after assessments. And four of the six providers had been unable to meet targets for reporting the results of final biopsies to women within a reasonable time.

All except Otago-based BreastScreen HealthCare met the target of giving 95 per cent of women their screening result within 10 working days.

Raising concerns about low screening coverage for Maori and Pacific Island women, the report said it might be necessary to review the invitation process "to establish whether it is due to a lack of or ineffective invitation for these women."

- NZPA