Health screening is saving lives but may not always save money and has an uncertain future, an expert says.
National Screening Advisory Committee chairman Alistair Woodward called screening the "teenager of healthcare" and said it was "a bit unsure of its role, tending to be rather unco-ordinated andsometimes in the newspapers for the wrong reasons".
Speaking to a symposium at the National Screening Unit in Wellington yesterday, he said although screening programmes were currently reducing deaths from breast and cervical cancer, the future was not clear.
"There's a big appetite for screening from the public and health professionals who see it, and rightly so, as an effective way of detecting problems early and reducing harm and deaths.
"But screening is not straightforward. It isn't necessarily helpful to find disease early.
"Screening may save money, but it might not. The screening test itself is a small fraction of the total cost of screening."
Professor Woodward said competing demands for screening meant there would need to be ways of measuring the success of different forms of screening.
"Originally reduction in deaths was the gold standard by which we measured success in screening for conditions like breast and cervical cancer. Now, with programmes like screening newborns for hearing, that measure is no longer relevant and we need new tools to judge the success of such programmes," he said.
"I am wary of what I call the warrant of fitness fallacy. That is, that screening is seen as some sort of six-monthly check of bodily mechanics which then offers a clean bill of health, or indicates where repairs are needed.
"Unfortunately, the human body is a lot more complicated than a motor car. It is more difficult to spot the causes of ill-health, and as for the repairs, usually you can't simply whip in a new spark plug."
