Breast Screening Programme, England, 2023-24

This publication presents information about the NHS Breast Screening Programme (‘the programme’) in England in 2023-24. It reports on women who are invited for regular screening, presenting information on coverage, overall screening activity, invitation uptake, screening outcomes and cancers detected.

Under the programme, women from the age of 50 to their 71st birthday (50-<71) are invited for regular breast screening every 3 years. The intention of the screening programme is to detect breast cancer at an early stage when there is a better chance of successful treatment.

In some circumstances, women outside of this age range are also screened as part of the programme through self-referral. Statistics for women at very high risk of breast cancer are treated separately in this report, their data are reported in section 7.

In 2023-24, the Breast Screening Programme returned to normal operation following disruption from COVID-19 and subsequent recovery measures between 2020-21 and 2022-23. See COVID impact summary for details. When comparing screening activity in 2023-24 to previous years, bear in mind that between 2020-21 and 2022-23 the NHS Breast Screening Programme was significantly impacted by disruption from the COVID-19 pandemic. 
Data collection and validation processes were completed in compliance with the national data collection exercise, therefore, the accuracy and reliability of the statistics published in this report are of a comparable standard to previous years.