At the start of the year we made a commitment to the parliamentary Science and Technology Committee to produce a document explaining how the UK National Screening Committee (UK NSC) goes about collecting and analysing evidence, consulting and making recommendations on new and changing screening programmes.
This has been led by the UK NSC evidence team and I’m delighted that we have now completed this work. The UK NSC evidence review process has been published and describes how stakeholders can ask for screening to be considered when we pilot an annual call for new topics in September 2016, how to request an early update to a topic due to significant new peer-reviewed evidence, and how to suggest a modification to an existing screening programme. It also describes how the committee and supporting secretariat will consider the applications.
This means that anyone will be able to suggest a potential new screening programme. There is guidance in the document about how to go about this and the sort of high level evidence that the secretariat will need to be able to consider the proposal. We hope that our stakeholders will find this new publication useful. As ever, please let us know what you think.