Bowel cancer screening

Overview

Bowel cancer is the fourth most common cancer in the UK, with around 46,600 new cases every year (2018-19, 2021). Patients who are diagnosed with bowel cancer at its earliest stage have more treatment options available that are more likely to be successful compared to patients diagnosed at a late stage.  

Bowel cancer screening reduces deaths from bowel cancer¹

. It aims to both prevent bowel cancer through the identification and removal of pre-cancerous polyps or adenomas ², and to detect it at an early stage before symptoms have a chance to develop. There are separate bowel cancer screening programmes for each UK nation, with differences between them. These are outlined in the table below and in our bowel cancer screening at a glance resource.  

Bowel	England	Scotland	Wales	Northern Ireland
Age	50-74	50-74	50-74	60-74
Frequency	2 yearly On request from 75	2 yearly On request from 75	2 yearly	2 yearly
Test	Faecal Immunochemical Test (FIT)
Threshold	120 µg/g	80 µg/g	80 µg/g	120 µg/g
Uptake [b]	63% (2023 - 24) [a]	66% (2022 - 24)	66% (2023 - 24)	67% (2023 - 24)

[a] NHS England is beginning to reduce the FIT threshold to 80 µg/g across several early-adopter sites.

[b] Caution should be taken when making comparisons across countries due to differences in time periods of data, changes to age ranges and/or differences in the definitions of coverage and uptake of screening.

For practical support, our bowel cancer screening primary care good practice guide offers tools and resources to help primary care teams support informed participation. 

Download our bowel cancer screening good practice guide.  (PDF, 1.1 MB)

Insights

Overview of UK bowel cancer screening programmes

Find information on eligibility, the test used ‘FIT’ , uptake data, promoting informed choice, safety netting and surveillance.

Encouraging informed participation

Includes information on the screening test, uptake statistics, promoting informed choice, safety netting and surveillance.

Improvements and future optimisation

Includes information around planned changes to the programme, including age extension and FIT sensitivity thresholds.

Resources for UK health professionals

• Download our bowel cancer screening primary care good practice guide(PDF, 1.1 MB) for practical steps practices across the UK can take to support informed participation in their local population. 

• Explore our bowel cancer screening hub developed with Doctors.net UK for educational content (login required). 

• Visit our cancer early diagnosis data hub for the latest UK statistics on bowel cancer incidence, survival by stage, and screening uptake.  

• Visit our FIT symptomatic webpages for an overview of the key differences between the use of FIT for screening vs. for investigating people with symptoms across the UK nations.   

Resources for patients

Our public-facing bowel cancer screening webpages provide accessible information on bowel cancer screening, including the benefits and harms, eligibility criteria, and instructions on how to complete the test. 

Videos

An animated video that explains how to complete the bowel cancer screening test kit. There's a subtitled version too. 

• ‘How to do the bowel cancer screening test’ - subtitled version 

• ‘How to do your bowel screening test’ (Scotland) 

• ‘How to do your bowel screening test’ (Wales) - English language 

• ‘How to do your bowel screening test’ (Wales) - Welsh language 

• ‘How to do your bowel screening test’ – Northern Ireland 

Downloadable guides - how to do bowel cancer screening

Step-by-step infographics on how to complete the bowel cancer screening test kit and practical tips on how to collect the poo sample.

• England(PDF) 

• Scotland(PDF) 

• Northern Ireland(PDF) 

• Wales (English language)(PDF) 

• Wales (Welsh language)(PDF) 

National bowel cancer screening programmes public information  

Each UK nation has its own hub of resources to support people to take part in bowel cancer screening, with nation-specific information in multiple languages and accessible formats:

• GOV.UK for England  

• Public Health Wales  

• NHS Inform for Scotland  

• Public Health Agency for Northern Ireland