Issues with bowel screening invitations related to IT

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The Ministry of Health says many more people than first thought didn’t receive invitations for free bowel screening during the bowel screening pilot programme, due partly to IT issues.

The pilot invited almost 200,000 Waitemata residents between 2011 and January 2017 and successfully screened 117,000, but the Ministry says about 15,000 may have missed out (this includes the 2,500 previously publicised).

National Screening Unit Clinical Director, Dr Jane O’Hallahan, says the Ministry takes full responsibility for the oversights, which were a result of pilot IT issues and human error.

O’Hallahan says the National Bowel Screening Programme (NBSP) is New Zealand’s first screening programme that has attempted to enrol all eligible people in the population. She says this was an ambitious task for the Ministry team that set up the pilot.

“Tracing people who didn’t have up-to-date addresses in the National Health Index (NHI) has been a challenge and, at the time of the pilot, our systems for updating records in the bowel screening register from the NHI could have been better. We have clearly failed some people and for that we are sorry.

“I want to emphasise these issues are only related to the pilot phase of the programme and residents in Waitemata District Health Board. We have refined and improved our processes for the NBSP is currently being rolled out around the country.”

The Minister of Health, David Clark, ordered an independent review into the National Bowel Screening Programme after it was revealed earlier this year that 2500 Waitemata residents missed out on an invitation for bowel screening.

O’Hallahan says the review team, led by Professor Gregor Coster, has been made aware of the higher numbers of people now thought to be impacted by the Ministry’s pilot issues.

Source: Ministry of Health media release, 17 April 2018

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