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Leading the way in the fight against cervical cancer
Written by Communications Team   

Cervical cancer is the second most common cancer in women under 35 years old. Ashford and St Peter's Hospitals NHS Trust is doing all it can to support the prevention of this terrible disease through its improved cervical screening service.

Smear tests are offered to all women over the age of 25 years old and widely available at GP practices and other community health centres. The pathology lab at St Peter’s hospital processes over 34,000 cervical samples each year and offers one of the quickest services in the country.
  


Behdad Shambayati, Consultant Clinical Cytologist
 
 
A year ago, the average turnaround time between a cervical sample being collected by a smear test and the woman receiving her results in the post was 14.5 days. Today, that time has been reduced to just 7.5 days, which greatly relieves the worry and stress patients may feel whilst waiting for their result.


Bahdad Shambayati, Consultant Clinical Cytologist, leads the cervical screening team and explained how they managed to improve the service so dramatically.

“We worked closely with NHS Improvement, which is a government agency dedicated to improving the experience of patients and with other health organisations such as local GP surgeries and Surrey Primary Care Support Services (PCSS). We looked at each stage in the patient journey from when the sample is taken to when the results are delivered and questioned how and why we did everything. It soon became clear where small amounts of time were being wasted and things could be done more efficiently.

We made several small but important changes, such as screening slides in batches of 10 rather than 20 to prevent any stockpiling through the lab. We also started sending the results to the PCSS earlier in the day so they can catch the same day’s post – women receive their results one day earlier just through this simple change.

Often, it’s only when you take a step back and ask as a group ‘how can we do this better’ that real improvements can be made. We’re delighted women are receiving their results a week quicker on average and that we are playing our part in the early prevention of cervical cancer.”

Things ran smoothly in this year long project to improve the cervical screening service, until February when news of Jade Goody’s terminal cancer hit the media.

Behdad said: “We experienced a huge increase in workload during this time and received 4000 extra samples over a 3 month period. Our turnaround time inevitably suffered but we managed to clear the backlog within a month, outperforming many other labs. This was definitely, in part, due to our improved performance and it goes to show what can be done at little cost when people work together.”

Last Updated ( Monday, 19 October 2009 15:53 )