ADDITIONAL AND REPEATED INVITATIONS IN THE NATIONAL BREAST CANCER SCREENING PROGRAM

Sa？etak Introduction: The National Breast Cancer Screening Program (NBCSP) in the Croatia was adopted in 2006. The target group are women 50-69 years of age who are invited to mammography. To reduce breast cancer mortality response rate of at least 70% is needed. This response rate is still not achieved nationally. Aim: The aim of this study was to analyse the impact of additional and repeated calls on the response rate of women to mammograms and breast cancer screening in Po？ega-Slavonia County (PSC) as part of the fifth cycle of NBCSP. Also to show the impact on the response rate of repeated mailed invitation and additional phone calls and to determine the contribution of first, repeated, or additional mammography invitations to breast cancer detection. Materials and Methods: Subjects of present study were all women involved in fifth round of NBCSP invitations (2017-2019). The hospital information system and the NBCSP database were used as data sources. Results of the study showed that repeated calls by mail increased women's response rate by 14.5% in PSC. Additional calls to non-respondent women, available for intervention, increased women's response rate by 36.7%. Among women who were newly diagnosed with breast cancer during the fifth round, most women responded to the first invitation in NBCSP (70.3%), followed by the women who did not respond (16.2%) who were also the oldest. A smaller percentage of women were referred to screening by their physician (8.1%), and 5.4% of women performed mammography after repeated invitation. Conclusion: The implementation of NBCSP is of great importance because three out of four newly diagnosed women with breast cancer were diagnosed within the NBCSP at the first or repeated invitation