This has to be the ultimate in waste of NHS funds.

Completely agree Grannypauline. The underfundung of the NHS has nothing to do with immigration

Jinty44, my husband worked for a public service and when somebody transitioned, you were not allowed to record their sex at birth, it had to be the sex they wanted to be. It caused all sorts of problems but the confidentiality about gender was paramount. I suspect the same rules now apply with the NHS.

Yesterday, someone didn't inform the hospital that they were not attending their chemotherapy session. The nurse said " that's £10,000 worth of treatment wasted. So shocked.

Marianne1953 If the letters are generated from a computer database, there is probably not a field in the database for whether or not someone has a cervix, just whether they are male or female, so i don't think that is possible.
There was an advertising campaign aimed at "Anyone with a cervix" but that was criticised because not every woman knows the anatomical names for their body parts, especially if English is not their first language, so would not know that it was aimed at them.

Seems as if the NHS can't win on this one

Personally, I feel the biggest issue with the UK's cervical screening programme is how little attention and publicity is given to its false positive and false negative rates, especially in younger women.

blogs.webmd.com/womens-health/20110606/how-accurate-is-my-pap-smear-result

"Paradoxically, increasing PAP smear sampling among low risk women actual increases your chance of getting a “false positive” one day. For example (DeMay, 2000), if you get a yearly PAP between the ages of 18 to 78, and one assumes a 5% incidence of false positives, you would have a 95% chance of getting a false positive report during that time."

I find the process extremely psychologically difficult and have chosen not to attend for the last decade. I am unlikely to attend screening again.

muffinthemoo I understand completely your feelings about going for a smear test, but just have to tell you that if I had not gone for a test some thirty years ago and had the treatment that followed I would probably be dead by now.

I knew a Gynae Consultant in Spain who said if you could afford it, you should get tested annually. He felt that the 3 year gap was just too long and that in that time you could go from negative to life threatening. My friend lost her daughter who was in her twenties to this and it was truly shocking.

quizqueen immigrants do not make the greatest demands on the nhs though , it’s the elderly and the disabled, so don’t blame the migrants ( as we said before, the nhs would collapse without its immigrant workers).

Ilovecheese I am glad you were diagnosed and treated; good health and long life to you

I wouldn't be prepared to have treatment if I had a poor result, so there is no point in me going for screening. I understand the statistics around the risk for me, and I'm satisfied with my choice.

I do strongly feel that the false positive rate in particular is not well known. I understand the imperative for aggressive and early treatment, but that treatment is often destructive in nature and "borderline" smears or very low grade changes can cause quite incredible anxiety.

I think the results need to be better discussed by GPs and better contextualised for the patient.