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The national Bowel Screening Programme, which was paused by the Covid-19 restrictions, restarted on June 4, asking people who received a test kit in the mail just before or during the lockdown to complete it and send it back.
Bowel screening programme clinical director, Dr Susan Parry, says about 29,000 participants were sent letters advising them to hold off sending their bowel screening test kit back until the restrictions were lifted. The kits have a six-month expiry date.
Dr Parry says the tests can help detect early bowel cancers and really do save lives. “At this time of heightened awareness, this is a positive and proactive thing people can do for their health,” she says. Dr Parry says despite the pause in sending out test kits during the lockdown, the free programme continued to process test results for people already on the screening pathway.
She says those with positive test results are now being offered follow-up investigations, in most cases a colonoscopy. “District Health Boards (DHBs) are working through the backlog of cases to offer timely colonoscopies. We are asking people to be patient as they wait for their appointment. We understand that for some people this may be an anxious time but it is important to remember that 92 out of 100 people who return a positive test do not have bowel cancer.”
The sending out of further test kits did not begin until June 11, to give District Health Boards time to catch up with the backlog. The programme, currently available in half the country’s DHBs, has sent out more than 430,000 kits since it began nearly three years ago and detected more than 600 cancers, as well as removing thousands of potentially cancerous polyps.
