Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the adequacy of access by disabled people to cancer screening; and what information his Department holds on such access.

NHS England is committed to improving the accessibility of the breast, bowel and cervical cancer screening programmes. Providers of NHS screening services are required to make reasonable adjustments to ensure that their services are accessible to disabled people.

The Department and NHS England are working to set out actions to improve accessibility to and uptake of screening including ensuring that Primary Care Networks are provided with primary care data analytics for population segmentation and risk stratification to allow them to understand in depth their populations’ health and care needs for screening programmes. NHS England is supporting a range of research and evaluation to assess the feasibility and acceptability of self-sampling within the NHS Cervical Screening Programme to support an improvement in the accessibility of cervical screening.

The breast screening service offers longer appointments at accessible sites to support women with physical disabilities to have a successful screen. Services make reasonable adjustments, within the constraints of equipment, to ensure that disabled people are offered the opportunity to have breast screening.