Our policy on cancer screening

Screening for cancer involves testing large groups of healthy, non-symptomatic, people to look for early signs of some cancers, or pre-cancers. This can help doctors find these cancers at an early stage, or with some types of cancer, even spot early signs that suggest cancer is likely to develop. This makes treatment simpler and more likely to be effective.

The UK runs three national screening programmes for breast, cervical and bowel cancer. You can find out more about screening in the UK here.

We want the UK Governments to ensure that the best possible cancer screening programmes are available to all adults who might benefit from them regardless of where in the UK they live. We are particularly concerned with variation in participation rates in screening between different groups and communities. We want targeted action to be taken to improve the numbers of people attending screening.

In 2007 Cancer Research UK launched our Screening Matters campaign. This campaign called on the Government to pledge to get three million more people to participate in screening across the UK over the next five years. We also called on the Governments of the four nations of the UK to ensure that they are providing the best possible screening programmes through adequate funding, staffing and measuring success.

We believe there are several important steps that the Government needs to take to ensure these are met to reduce variations in the screening programmes across the UK. In particular this involves:

• Ensuring that screening services are adequately staffed to screen people at the appropriate time and provide them with their results quickly;
• Finding new ways to encourage those who aren’t taking part in screening to participate;
• Improving the collection of information on how services are running and which people are being left out.

In addition, a recent study by Atkin et al (2010) has shown that a one-off test called flexible sigmoidoscopy (or 'flexi-scope') can reduce bowel cancer incidence by a third and reduce mortality from the disease by up to half. We are calling on the Government to introduce the test into a national screening programme as a matter of priority. This will be very cost-effective in the medium- to long-term