The National Lung Cancer Screening Program is Australia’s first targeted screening program. GPs are responsible for referring eligible individuals into The Program. It can be difficult for GPs to identify which patients might be eligible for screening because smoking pack-year history is not recorded in the practice EMR.
To help primary care providers identify patients who may be eligible for screening, our team has developed a letter template that can be sent to patients with recorded smoking history who are aged 50-70 years. The letter has been tested with 38 General Practices as part of the Ready to Screen trial. The letter explains the screening program and provides a link via QR code to our pack-year calculator to help individuals understand their eligibility. Interested individuals can then update this information with their primary care practice and seek a referral for a lung scan as part of the National Lung Cancer Screening Program.
Our team can also provide a guide on identifying patients aged 50-70 years with a history of smoking using your medical software (e.g. Best Practice, Cubiko etc).
We’d like to understand who is using these resources, so we ask you to provide some information before we send you an editable version of our suggested letter. Your information is kept confidential and is not used for any other purpose than reporting uptake of our tools.
You can also access information on the National Lung Cancer Screening Program relevant to GPs at the following links:
https://www.health.gov.au/our-work/nlcsp/for-healthcare-providers?language=en
https://www.ncsr.gov.au/lung-program/for-healthcare-providers
https://www1.racgp.org.au/newsgp/clinical/national-lung-cancer-screening-program-what-gps-ne