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Written question asked by Sandra Gidley (Liberal Democrat) on Monday, 16 October 2006, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Wednesday, 18 October 2006. It was answered by Baroness Winterton of Doncaster (Labour) on Wednesday, 8 November 2006 on behalf of the Department of Health.

Cervical Cancer

Question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health what estimate she has made of the number of unreadable cervical smear tests since the implementation of liquid based cytology for cervical cancer screening.
Answer

Following the evaluation of a Government funded pilot study of Liquid Based Cytology (LBC), the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) concluded in October 2003 that this new technology should be rolled out across the national health service (NHS). NICE concluded LBC will reduce the number of inadequate tests, meaning around 300,000 women a year will not have to go through the anxiety of being re-tested every year just because their slide could not be read.It will take five years to implement LBC across England as all staff who read the tests or take the samples from women will have to be retrained. As at September 2006, of the 142 laboratories that process cervical screening samples 67 have fully implemented LBC and 35 are intending to implement LBC by March 2007.The latest year for which statistics on the programme are available is 2004-05, which was at the start of the roll-out of LBC implementation. We are therefore yet to see a major reduction in the number of inadequate tests across the whole programme. However, we have seen a significant reduction in the pilot sites, which is shown in the following table:

Percentage
Pilot site Inadequate test results 2000-01 Inadequate test results 2004-05
Southmead Hospital (Bristol) 9.7 0.9
Royal Victoria Infirmary (Newcastle) 9.1 0.4
Norfolk and Norwich 7.5 1.5

We would expect to start seeing an effect of LBC on the rate of inadequate samples across the whole programme when the statistics for 2005-06 are published in December 2006.

Secondary information

Type
Written question
Reference
95223; 451 c1802W;451 c1804W
Session
2005-06
Subjects
Cervical cancer Screening
Link
View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk