I’ve been working as the Breast Screening Programme Admin Manager for the Greater Manchester Breast Screening Programme, based at the Nightingale Centre for the last 9 years, but have been involved working within breast services for much longer.
It’s a very varied role which makes it interesting as well as being really important as screening is so critical to detecting breast cancer early.
I have a team of seven staff and together we arrange the screening of approximately 45000 women a year, liaising with 259 GP practices – it’s a very busy office!
We have six sites for breast screening all across Greater Manchester, as well as two static and four mobile breast screening units that move around Greater Manchester. On an average day, we screen around 50 women a day at each of those sites, so those numbers make us the third biggest breast screening programme in the country.
So we’re big and we have a lot of bookings, a lot of appointments to make! We need to liaise with each GP practice in Greater Manchester as they give us the list of women in their practice who are due to be screened. We then send the letters out inviting them for their mammography. We also prepare the lists for the screening vans each day so the mammographers know who to expect. My team act as the first point of contact for women who’ve been sent an appointment for screening. If women have a query, want to change their appointment or have something they’re not happy about, they’ll ring the office and my team deal with it very, very well.
As we are part of the national breast screening programme run by NHS England, I am also responsible for reporting on how we are doing and how we are meeting national targets. We need to collect data on every single person that we invite for screening from the point that we invite them, right up until they are either discharged as a 3-yearly routine recall; or recalled for assessment, diagnosed with and treated for a cancer.
We submit reports on a yearly basis with all that data so that’s a big part of my role.
Meeting our targets is a constant challenge, especially the target of screening every woman who is eligible within three years of their last screen when you’ve got such huge population as ours – if somebody’s called for their mammography just one day beyond the 36 months, then they’re not going to achieve that target.
Despite these challenges I really love my role. It sounds like a cliche, but it’s a great team here at the Nightingale Centre. Many members of the admin team have been here quite a while and are happy here. I like the fact that we liaise with all sorts of outside sources – our Commissioners, NHS England and with a lot of the other screening programmes. We have national meetings so we’re all kept in touch with each other. I enjoy that aspect of my role as well.
It’s also good to know we are making a real contribution. The national breast screening programme couldn’t happen without the admin team inviting women to come for their mammograms – that’s where it all starts.
It’s really important to increase the uptake of breast screening, We work really closely with our two cancer screening improvement leads. They are part of the national Breast Screening Programme and their sole purpose is to improve the breast screening programme and increase uptake. So they spend a lot of time going to focus groups and community groups, and GP surgeries meeting groups of women and encouraging them to attend their mammogram when they are invited to be screened.
The data we collect on women who have been screened really helps the cancer screening improvement leads know where to target their efforts too. They spend a lot of time with the GP practices in those areas trying to raise awareness that screening can pick up signs of breast cancer long before a lump can be felt.
I think admin jobs in cancer screening offer a lot of career opportunities where you can feel you are making a real contribution. You could obviously start as an admin assistant, go to Deputy office manager, go to an office manager, go to a programme manager. There is a lot of variation there and I think once you’ve worked in one sort of screening programme, then you have the skills and experience to work in another such as bowel or cervical cancer screening so this widens the career opportunities further still.