Targeting cancer screening where it's needed most

Breast screening reduces the number of deaths from breast cancer by about 1,300 a year in the UK alone. Catching cancer early makes it quicker and easier to treat, but nearly four out of every 10 women eligible for screening don’t attend. To make sure as many people as possible are accessing screening services, it’s vital that breast screening is offered in places that are easy and convenient to attend, to avoid barriers which could discourage people from taking up their screening invitation.

SHAPE Local has been used by NHS organisations to ensure their breast screening services were in the right place for the right people.

By using SHAPE Local, you can import and map where your screening services are against local populations and demographics, including:

• Age bands
• Ethnicity
• Deprivation index
• Prevalence of certain health conditions
• Travel times

You can cross reference this data against the demographics of groups you are finding it difficult to attract to screenings, and find correlations between the two. For example, if certain age bands are less likely to attend screenings, you can find locations where people of that age are more likely to live.

Looking at it from another point of view, health organisations can also analyse screening premises in terms of performance. If a particular screening site is seeing low uptake in comparison to other locations, it may be that your promotion efforts are not resonating with people in the area. By using SHAPE to identify the population make-up around the screening premises or in the target location, you can ensure you use appropriate messaging and channels to reach people.

SHAPE Local is a prepopulated private workspace that allows you to overlay your own local datasets with prepopulated national data. To find out how it can help you improve your screening rates, get in touch.