Bowel screening misses mark

HEALTH: Rural GP says programme has flaws, writes Susan Murray.

Arural GP says the nationwide bowel screening programme will miss the mark with his patient group and its success will be limited. The screening programme aims to save lives through early detection and it has just started being rolled out in Waikato this month.

This brings the number of district health boards now offering bowel screening to 15.

It involves a self testing kit, which is posted out to people aged between 60 and 74.

Kawhia GP John Burton said he was thrilled the programme had arrived locally at last, but believed it had huge design flaws.

Burton said it would be better if rural health clinics were involved well before the first letter arrived in mailboxes, out of the blue. He said in his experience, people appreciated having a professional explaining what was required of them.

“The collection of the specimen, it looks like quite a cool way of doing it, but again if that could’ve been explained personally to people, you would get a much better uptake and I’m particularly worried about Ma¯ori patients and the older Ma¯ ori patients.”

Postage from rural areas was also concern, Burton said sometimes it could take upwards of a week for mail to reach Auckland.

“It may be that there are better ways of doing it than using the post, we are going to find that quite a few of the samples take more than the required seven days to get to Auckland for processing.”

Burton said another difficulty was the follow-up method for nonresponding people.

He said the three follow-up phone calls, then a visit if the calls had not worked, would be a waste of money. “People could drive an hour and a half and find the person they spoke to in the morning is no longer at home.”

He said organisers might re-look at how the programme runs when they saw sectors of a population were missed out, but simple improvements could be made immediately.

A 2017 report prepared for the Ministry of Health showed Ma¯ori are 30 per cent less likely than non-ma¯ ori to get bowel cancer but once diagnosed are 30 per cent more likely to die from bowel cancer. ■ — RNZ