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Cervical Screening in the UK

This page presents statistics from the NHS cervical screening programme.

Summary statistics from the Cervical Screening Programme in England - 2006

• Around 4.4 million women were invited for screening
• 3.6 million women were screened
• Laboratories examined just under 4 million samples
• Cervical screening can prevent around 75% of cancer cases in women who attend regularly

One way of examining the effectiveness of the screening programme is to look at the coverage* rate.

In England the proportion of eligible women attending cervical smear tests improved from just above 40% in 1989 to 82% in 1995. Last year the coverage rate was 79.5%.

The target age-group and frequency of invite for each country of the UK is shown in (Table 1.1).

Download this table (21.5KB)

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*The coverage rate is the proportion of resident eligible women who have had a test with a recorded result at least once in the previous 5 years e.g the number of women screened divided by the number of resident eligible population

In this section you can read about:

• a brief history of the cervical screening programme
• results from the cervical screening programmes in the UK

More information about cervical screening

Cancer screening saves lives. But we know it could save even more.

Sign our pledge to show your support for our Screening Matters campaign calling on the UK governments to commit to getting more people into cancer screening and making sure the best possible programmes are available.

Find out more about how cervical screening is performed and why it is important.

Our patient information website answers your questions about cervical screening.

Further cervical screening programme statistics can be found on the NHS Cervical Screening Programme website.

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