Recipe Name:

Patients turning 50 in the next three months eligible for bowel and/or breast screen

Rationale:

People can be less likely to respond to their first screening invitation than to subsequent invitations.[i] 

GPs play an important role in encouraging people turning 50 to respond to their first invitation to  BreastScreen NSW and the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program.

This recipe supports practices to identify patients who will be send an invitation letter from the National Bowel Cancer Screening Program and/or BreastScreen in the next three months so that the practice can reinforce to the patient the importance of responding to this invitation/s. 

[i] Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW): National Bowel Cancer Screening Program Monitoring Report 2019. Canberra: AIHW, 2019.

Target:

The number of active patients turning 50 in the next three months who are eligible for bowel and/or breast screening

Recipe Limitations:

This report excludes patients with a number of conditions under the 'ineligible’ category.

Practices should be aware of the diagnosis codes that PEN uses to assign patients to ‘ineligible’. 

Practices should undertake periodic clinical review of patients in the ‘ineligible’ category to assess if any of these patients should return to screening.

Your practice may have patients that you consider clinically ineligible for screening that are not captured by these diagnosis codes.  These patients should be manually opted out of screening.

CAT Starting Point:

  1. CAT Open - CAT4 view (all reports) loaded
  2. Population Extract Loaded and Extract Pane “Hidden”
    1. Filter Pane open
    2. OPTIONAL under the ‘General’ tab ‘Active Patients’ (3x <2 years) selected

CAT4 starting point




RECIPE Steps Filters:

  • In the “General” Tab, select the 'Mths' radio button and enter Start Age = 597 and End Age = 600 months. If required, select 'Active' to search for your active patients only!



You can select the Gender/Female but the report will automatically show female patients as well as patients with no gender entered. This is the preferred approach, as it will include all patients potentially at risk including those without gender information entered.

Practices should review those patients for whom no gender is entered to ensure they are only sent appropriate cancer screening reminders.  Consideration should be given to keeping a register of transgender, gender diverse and intersex patients to support this process.


  • Click "Recalculate"
  • Click ‘Hide Filters’


Report Steps

Breast Screening Only

  • Select the "Screening/Mammogram" tab

This report will show the selected patients and the proportion of patients without a mammogram recorded. To find patients eligible for breast screening select all patients without a mammogram as well as those with a mammogram older than two years:




Bowel Cancer Screening Only

  • To find patients eligible for bowel cancer screening, go to the 'Screening/FOBT' tab
  • Select all patients without a FOBT as well as those with a FOBT older than two years:



Patient eligible for both Breast AND Bowel Cancer Screening

To find patients that are eligible for both FOBT and mammogram you can do a cross-tabulation. Leave the relevant parts of each pie chart selected as shown above and you should see a dot next to each report:



Then click on the 'Report' icon on top of your screen:



This will show a list of all patient meeting the selected categories on both reports:



To Export Patient List to Microsoft Excel:

1.  Click on the “Export Icon”  at the top of the Patient Reidentification window.



2.  Click on “XLSX”

3.   Choose a file name and a location to save to (eg. Create a folder C:/ClinicalAudit/CAT Patient Follow Up)

4.  Click “Save”


The steps above will produce a list of patients with contact details in MS Excel which can then be used to:

  1. Produce a mail merge or bulk SMS to remind patients to attend cancer screening.
  2. Phone patients to update their record or to remind them to attend cancer screening.
  3. Go back through the individual patient records in the GP Clinical Desktop System (CDS) and update known records


Optional Steps

There are a number of optional steps you can add. In the interest of keeping these recipes short, the optional steps are available in separate guides. You can combine the steps above with one, two or all three of the optional steps depending on your target group of patients.

Using Topbar Prompts in Recipes - create reminders for your clinicians based on the recipe searches

Using Recall CAT in Recipes - SMS and Voicemail directly from CAT4

Combine Screening Searches with MBS item eligibility - recall patients who are also eligible for MBS items related to chronic disease care or prevention