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Is NHS breast cancer screening status available digitally yet?
No.
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The NHS persistently keeps failing to send out breast cancer screening invitations.
There were two inquiries into a failure due to a single software issue in 2018. It found that over one hundred and twenty thousand women had been missed. Buried in the text of the inquiry were a further five thousand women missed for administrative error.
I can believe in good faith that they probably fixed that one issue. But software systems always have another bug waiting to be found and they didn't put in a safety net. I know this, because they then missed my mother. And as recently as March 2025 NHS England admitted to a further 5000 people across various screening programmes being missed due to administrative errors at GP surgeries. It keeps happening.
Simply give women direct access to their screening due (or overdue) dates. The inquiries established that the current barrier of phoning a GP is too high, but my mother called them anyway, only to be told she was on the list for screening when she wasn't. This would give something concrete to question far in advance. Otherwise, when these errors are found, it is too late to help those missed.
This is cheap, dirt cheap. Cheaper than a system sending letters in the post. Cheaper than missing cancers and having to spend money on longer chemotherapy courses. So cheap I offered to build the system myself. An individual offering to build something that could save lives for an organisation with a budget into the hundreds of billions.
It's an IT system, so outside the remit of screening. NHS Digital thought it wasn't their responsibility, before it was subsumed into NHS England, itself now going. One NHS Academic Health Science Network thought it a "nice to have" and would be more interested if I could show that it protected ethnic minoirities more than the ethnic majority. In short, arrogant, organisational ineptitude.
I wish I knew, I may be the wrong person to ask. I have tried knocking on so many doors that I am convinced I alone cannot affect any change. I assume that means only publicity, embarrassment, will ever address the situation. We know that people have died, having been missed by screening and that hasn't been enough. I can only suggest raising awareness; read the book, share it with a friend, send a copy to your MP or a journalist, follow the Tiktok account. And decide for yourself, you probably have ideas that I do not.
