What is screening?
Screening is a public health service in which the health service invites members of a defined population, who have no symptoms or other reason to believe they are unwell to come forward and be tested for the presence of a disease.
Screening populations for disease is fundamentally, philosophically and functionally different from detecting disease in a patient and has important ethical differences from everyday clinical practice.
- save lives;
- reduce the risk of developing a disease;
- reduce the risk of complications;
- enable more effective and timely treatment; and
- improve quality of life.
The following table shows the key differences between health screening and clinical practice within healthcare services:
|Clinical practice||Population screening|
|Who Initiates?||Patient||Health service|
|Role of the subject||Sick person||Normal person|
|Role of the service||Passive, Responding||Active, Searching|
|Ideal goal||To restore health to a sick person||To detect disease in a “healthy” person|
|Minimum goal||Not to make sick person worse||Not to make healthy person sick|