Women scared needlessly by blunders over breast screening
THOUSANDS of women were left worrying unnecessarily because health officials failed to get a grip on the breast screening scandal, a review warns.
Up to 129,000 patients were wrongly told they had missed their final mammogram due to errors by Public Health England.
The independent review criticises PHE for being ‘slow to develop a clear understanding of the incident’ and then ‘overstating’ its scale.
The failures came to light last May when the then Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said thousands of women had not been invited to their mammograms between 2009 and 2018.
Initially Mr Hunt claimed up to 450,000 were affected, but health officials later said that figure was an overestimate and a worst-case scenario.
The new review found 67,000 women missed their final mammogram – with a further 129,000 wrongly told they had not had their last screening.
It also criticises PHE, the Government agency responsible for screening, for ‘ delays in fully understanding the nature of the incident’.
PHE admitted last May that they had been aware of potential problems since March 2017, 14 months previously.
But they only informed Mr Hunt in March 2018 who made a statement in the Commons in May.
Mr Hunt later commissioned an independent review into the scandal carried out by experts at the Macmillan cancer charity, the Royal Marsden Hospital specialist cancer hospital in London and the Care Quality Commission.
Published yesterday, it is particularly critical of PHE and states ‘ the initial handling of the incident was not sufficiently gripped within Public Health England’.
Failings in the handling of the data resulted in ‘the severity of the incident being exaggerated’ and ‘thousands of women being warned unnecessarily that they may have been affected,’ it adds.
The problems arose due to misunderstandings at local breast screening units over the age at which women were invited to their final mammogram.
They are meant to attend every three years up until 71 but some units were stopping the invitation letters after the age of 70.
When the scandal emerged last May the problems were pinned on an IT failure but the review says that wasn’ t the case.
Lynda Thomas, chief executive of Macmillan Cancer Support, said: ‘ We know that the announcement in May of a breast screening incident caused anxiety for thousands of women, sometimes unnecessarily, and it was of critical importance that their voices and concerns were heard as part of this independent review.
‘It is completely unacceptable that there was confusion about what the breast screening programme should have been delivering. There needs to be clarity, and importantly women need clear information about what they should be able to expect.’
Duncan Selbie, chief executive at PHE said: ‘ Women can be completely confident in the future of the breast screening service as a consequence of this review.’