Pegasus Health and ScreenSouth are working together on a coordinated approach to improving cervical screening coverage for eligible women across Canterbury.
Louise McCarthy, General Manager at ScreenSouth , explains the motivation behind this collaboration.
“Due to COVID impact and a persistent equity gap in cervical screening for Māori, Pasifika, Asian, unscreened and under-screened women, we need to do something different to what has been done before.
“We’ve been looking at what’s happening around the country and looking at other initiatives and we think we need to take a targeted approach, working much more closely with general practice to support the practice team to engage priority women in cervical screening.”
“We’re very conscious of the pressures on general practice at the moment. Our proposal is around working with practices that have high populations of priority women, low coverage for priority women, and who also may not take up the free smears initiative.
“We’re looking to provide some staff resource to work very closely with the practice team to help them do their invites and recalls.”
Read more about the Cervical and HPV work by Pegasus teams and staff: