Screening – How?

ABSTRACT Besides the actual testing and analysis of samples, application of follow-up procedures, et cetera, screening programmes also involve the processes of contacting people for recruitment to the programme, informing them about the procedures prior to testing, as well as about the result of the test afterwards, counselling about possible follow up-procedures, and help with coping with the reactions to the test result. These features of screening programmes give rise to a host of questions of how screening programmes should be designed and conducted in these respects. Plausibly, all programmes should involve all of the tasks mentioned to some extent. But how much? And in what way? If ill-designed, the programme may end up not promoting the values it could have promoted and producing negative side-effects it could have avoided. So, even if defensible in terms of the condition targeted, the testing method utilised and the treatments available, a programme may still be open to serious criticism if organised in an inferior way. This has been underscored, e.g., in research on the new risk assessment methods in prenatal screening discussed in Section 3.2.1.