Do you ask patients about their cervical screening status?
No we don’t! Although we realise that this can be controversial for practice teams who currently collect this information on their registrations forms. Let us explain why we removed it from our form…
Why don’t you ask this question?
The reason why we don’t have this on our Healthtech-1 form is for clinical safety reasons, as assessed by our own Healthtech-1 Clinical Safety Officer, who is also a GP. This is due to the following reasons:
Patients may not be aware of when they last had their smear test, and may report this information inaccurately.
Patients may not be aware of their correct hysterectomy status; hysterectomy status is complex as they may have had a partial or total hysterectomy (in one, the patient keeps their cervix, and in the other it is removed with the womb).
OpenExeter is already used by practices to manage cervical screening, and this holds accurate information on the patient’s smear status.
It is safer for a patient to be inappropriately offered a smear test (e.g. a patient newly arrived from abroad, where they had a smear test recently) and the patient can decline it, rather than not offering a cervical smear in the first place.
Do you help us with smear test invites in any other way?
There is one group of patients in general practice that we might accidentally miss offering cervical screening to. These are transgender patients who were assigned female at birth but later transitioned to be male, and have gone through PCSE to be assigned a new NHS number. They may still have a cervix, therefore should be offered cervical screening, but this is not automatic as the system now regards them as not having a cervix.
To counter this, we ask patients if they have changed gender since birth:
This allows us to signal patients who have changed gender to your practice team after we have registered them, so that they can check OpenExeter for relevant screening, such as cervical, prostate, breast etc. and ensure they are added back to the system were relevant.
What’s a signal?
You can find out more about signals by reading this article.
🤔 Got thoughts on this? Please send us a message. We'd love to hear your feedback!