Professor Robert Steele, Professor of Surgery at the University of Dundee and Director of the Scottish Bowel Cancer Screening Programme;
Dr Anne Miles, Senior Research Associate, Health Behaviour Research Centre, Department of Epidemiology and Public Health, University College London
Screening for bowel cancer has recently been introduced across the UK. In order for screening to do ‘more good than harm’, adverse effects (including on psychological outcomes) need to be kept to a minimum. Research to date has shown that adverse psychological consequences of screening itself are minimal, but no work has examined how people feel after being diagnosed with cancer following a normal (that is, no cancer present) screening result.
This research aims to ascertain if people are aware that bowel screening is not 100% accurate and will therefore miss some cancers, and how this may influence both adjustment to their later cancer diagnosis and also levels of trust in the bowel screening programme.
The plan is to interview and then survey by post bowel cancer patients to discover if there are differences between three groups of people whose cancer was diagnosed either 1) after a normal (no cancer) result, 2) after an abnormal (cancer present) result, or 3) outside the screening programme, in terms of their level of concern about possible diagnostic delay, anger associated with their diagnosis and level of trust in the screening programme.
This page was last updated on 20-07-2011