A study looking at breast cancer screening in Scotland (TELBRECS)

Cancer type:

Breast cancer

Status:

Results

Phase:

Other

This study looked at why some women don’t take up the invitation to attend breast screening in Scotland.

More about this trial

Breast cancer screening can help find early signs of breast cancer. But not all women who are invited to breast cancer screening attend their appointment.

We know that women from poorer areas are less likely to attend screening. The researchers wanted to find out why some of these women do not to take up the invitation to have breast screening.

The aims of this pilot study were to find out:

more about how women feel about going to breast screening
if a telephone reminder could increase the number of women attending

Summary of results

The study team found that a brief telephone reminder doubled attendance at breast screening in this group of women compared with a letter reminder.

856 women took part in the study. They were put into 1 of 4 groups.

217 had the usual letter reminder (the control group)
212 had a letter reminder and a brief telephone reminder (the 1^st telephone reminder group)
213 had a letter reminder, a telephone reminder and a brief conversation with a researcher (the 2^nd telephone reminder group)
214 had a letter reminder, a telephone reminder and a brief conversation with a researcher – they were also asked if they might regret not being screened (the 3^rd telephone reminder group)

The study team looked at the number of women who made a screening appointment after they were contacted. This was:

19 in the control group
43 in the 1st telephone reminder group
30 in the 2nd telephone reminder group
36 in the 3rd telephone reminder group

Women in the 2^nd and 3^rd telephone reminder groups were told that the study team were trying to understand why some women do not take up their invitation to attend for breast screening when invited, and asked whether they would be prepared to answer some questions.

247 agreed to answer the researchers’ questions. The researchers asked the women:

how they felt about screening
why they didn’t attend
what might help them attend
in the 3rd telephone reminder group if they would have any regrets about not attending their screening appointment

The main findings of the study were that:

more women in the telephone reminder groups made and attended an appointment compared with the control group
overall, there was no difference in the numbers of women who made or actually went for their appointment between the 3 telephone groups.

The study team concluded that a brief telephone call, whether or not it included talking about attendance or possible regret was useful. But contacting the women was sometimes tricky as people did not always answer their phones or numbers were wrong. Women who said they would have regrets if they didn’t attend were more likely to make and attend an appointment.

The study team recommend that the breast screening service introduce telephone reminders to improve the numbers of women attending breast screening.

We have based this summary on information from the research team. The information they sent us has been reviewed by independent specialists (peer reviewed Open a glossary item ) and published in a medical journal. The figures we quote above were provided by the trial team who did the research. We have not analysed the data ourselves.