Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the (a) frequency of false (i) positives and (ii) negatives from the National Screening Programme for bowel cancer and (b) the effect of such false positives and negatives on waiting times for colonoscopy.

The National Bowel Screening Programme has been received positively since it commenced in 2006 and has seen a steady rise in participation achieving over 55% engagement over the last three years.

Table: Bowel screening engagement of the last three years

The programme expects that engagement will continue to increase following a positive recommendation from the UK National Screening Committee to use Faecal Immunochemical Test (FIT) as the primary screen test for bowel cancer. FIT has seen an increase in participation especially amongst men and in deprived areas as well as help reduce the number of deaths from bowel cancer.

Following a positive screening test approximately half (50%) of the patients, at colonoscopy will have either bowel cancer or adenomas that require surgical intervention. An additional 25% of patients will have another disease affecting the colon and may require medical attention outside of the bowel screening programme, with the remaining 25% of colonoscopies having no medical reason for a positive result.

Bowel screening has increased colonoscopy work and has subsequently helped to improve the quality of this service. False negatives from the screening test have no direct impact on the waiting times since colonoscopy is not undertaken.