Public Health Wales focuses on inequity as it seeks to improve screening uptake

Public Health Wales’s latest Screening Inequities report shows that people living in the most deprived communities in Wales are less likely to take up their offer of screening compared to those living in the least deprived communities.

Tackling inequity is a key priority for the Screening Division, and the Equity Strategy focuses action in five key areas: communication, community and engagement, collaboration, service delivery, data and monitoring.

The aim is to enable all eligible participants to make informed choices about screening. This is complex, influenced by language, community, cultural and economic factors impacting on behaviour, as well as physical access to services.

Key findings from the report highlight a social gradient in uptake of screening across all the adult screening programmes. 

There is also geographical variation in uptake of screening at health board and local authority level.  The report also identifies other inequities:

• For programmes that invite people across age groups there is an inequity in uptake of the screening offer with people in younger age groups less likely to take up their offer of screening than people in older age groups.

• For programmes that invite all genders to participate in screening there is an inequity of uptake with men less likely to take up their offer than women, though the inequity gap is small.

• For programmes where people are invited more than once, people who have previously attended are more likely to respond to subsequent invitations. 

Screening Consultant Bethan Bowden said:

“We want everyone who is eligible to have equal access and opportunity to take up their offer of a free NHS screening test.”

“We will use this report to increase our understanding of where screening inequities exist and focus our efforts on reducing health inequalities. We hope this report is helpful for our partners across health services to consider what action they can also take.”

The report presents data on those invited for screening from April 2021 to March 2022. Allowing participants six months to take up their offer of screening, this reflects uptake/coverage as of October 2022. The data presented focuses on the determinants and demographic factors that are currently collected within routine data collection.

You can read the full report here.
Screening Division Inequity Report 2023