Cancer charities demand action after thousands ‘miss vital tests’
CANCER charities have called for urgent action after it emerged that thousands of patients may have missed cancer screenings and jabs during the past decade.
Health officials are investigating reports that adults who should have been invited for breast and bowel cancer screening were not, and that children missed out on vital jabs.
Samia al Qadhi, the chief executive of Breast Cancer Care, said “Even hearing there’s the possibility of further issues with invitations to breast screening will compound the anxiety and uncertainty felt by many women after the awful failings earlier this year. If there have been problems they must be tackled urgently.”
Sara Hiom, Cancer Research UK’s director of early diagnosis, said: “If people have missed screening invitations as a result of these errors then that is extremely concerning. Our cancer- screening programmes are of a very high standard and detect cancers at the earliest stages, when they are much more likely to be effectively treated.
“We hope that anyone affected is contacted immediately and offered screening wherever appropriate.”
The last breast cancer-screening scandal, three months ago, led Jeremy Hunt, the health secretary at the time, to apologise for errors that were estimated to have caused up to 75 deaths.
An urgent investigation into the latest failing is under way, with Matt Hancock, the Health Secretary, due to be updated on the scale of the risks tomor- row. The latest blunders are thought to relate to medical records for 55,000 patients, some of which could date back as far as 2008.
Patients may not have been invited to child immunisation, newborns’ hearing screening, safeguarding, bowel cancer screening, breast screening, and abdominal aortic aneurysm screening.
The investigation is understood to be at an early stage and there is no direct evidence any patients have been harmed.
However, a document by officials from NHS England and NHS Improvement, obtained by Health Service Journal, shows concerns about potential “risk of harm” to patients associated with 120,000 discrepancies between two NHS IT systems.
Ms Hiom added: “It’s concerning to hear of further problems with NHS technology, especially if people have inadvertently missed screening, vaccinations or care as a result.”