Cervical cancer screening appointments (FOI)

​Request

Please kindly provide the amount of cervical cancer screening appointment notices sent out and the amount of appointments attended from 2009 to 2017, broken down by year.

Response

As the majority (approximately 70%) of cervical screening appointments take place in GP surgeries, we (the Preventive Programmes Team who now manage administration for the Cervical Screening Programme) currently send ‘screening appointment notices’ to a woman’s GP or Le Bas Centre, depending on where the woman previously attended for screening. The GP surgery or Le Bas Centre then prompts the woman to make an appointment.

As we do not have access to information on the number of notices sent by GP surgeries, we have assumed it would be of greater use to you to know the number of women for whom we sent out a recall letter to a GP surgery or Le Bas Centre. We are therefore providing this information in table 1.

Table 1

*Due to an upgrade in the laboratory system that manages the cervical screening recall letters, we have been unable to retrieve information from the system for 2009 to 2012.

We do not have access to the amount of appointments attended in GP surgeries. However, because all screening ‘smear’ samples taken (known by ourselves as cytology requests) are sent to the hospital for processing, we have provided the number of sample requests received by our laboratory in table 2.

Table 2

Our uptake / coverage for cervical screening in Jersey is 74% and this is similar to the overall uptake / coverage in the UK.

We wish to highlight that a reduction in the annual number of recall letters sent and in the number of cytology requests received over recent years was expected as a result of medical advances and emerging evidence in cervical screening. These led to changes in the programme which include a later start age for screening, a ceasing of one year repeat samples and less frequent screening being required for older women. These changes to the screening programme are explained below.

In Autumn 2011 in Jersey, Health and Social Services implemented a nationally recommended improvement to cytology testing known as liquid based cytology (LBC). The change to LBC increased the reliability of the screening test and meant it was no longer necessary for women, who were having their first screening in Jersey, to require a one year repeat test – instead it was safe in these instances for women to be screened three yearly.

In Autumn 2013, the age at which women start screening in Jersey was increased from 20 to 25 years. This followed guidance from the UK expert National Screening Committee (NSC) advising all UK countries to start screening at 25 after a review of evidence showed that screening before this age could do more harm than good. We explain this further on our webpages at:

Cervical screening (smear tests) and HPV vaccine

Also in Autumn 2013, the screening interval for women aged 50 to 69 was changed from three yearly to five yearly, following recommendations from the NSC that five yearly screening was safe and effective for this age group of women. Nationally and locally this change was welcomed by older women who no longer needed to be tested so frequently.

The net impact of these changes has been to reduce both the overall number of recall letters sent and the number of cytology samples received.

Further information about cervical screening is available at:

Cervical screening (smear tests) and HPV vaccine

or

Cervical screening: programme overview