 Full programme transcript >>
Medical Screening
This week Dr Graham Easton is locuming while Dr Mark Porter is away.
Your car has an MOT check every year, so why not do the same for your body? You may not have any symptoms at the moment, but who knows what might be festering under your bonnet?
The NHS offers several screening programmes from breast cancer to antenatal tests, and it’s on the brink of adding bowel cancer screening and aortic aneurysm screening to the list.
Under new government plans everyone aged 40 to 74 in England will be offered health checks for heart disease, stroke, diabetes and kidney disease.
So why was it decided that we will be screened for those conditions, but not prostate cancer or lung cancer, for example? And is screening necessarily a good thing? Is it a welcome lifesaver or is it turning us all into patients?
In this week’s Case Notes, Dr Graham Easton is joined in the studio by three experts to discuss these issues: Julietta Patnick, Director of NHS Cancer Screening Programmes, Dr Ann McPherson, Oxford GP and co-founder of DIPEX, the Database of Patient Experiences, and Hany Hafez, a vascular surgeon at St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester who’s been one of the pioneers of screening for aortic aneurysms.
Graham also hears the reasons why not everyone takes up the offer of screening, and why many women are still confused about cervical screening, twenty years after its introduction.
Next week: Knees |
30 min
