Research from a team at Imperial College London has shown sending a text message reminder can lead to more women taking up cervical screening.
The findings also indicate the approaches and language used in the text messages can support greater uptake.
The research has been published in the journal Preventive Medicine following a study of almost 15,000 women in Northwest London. The findings highlight that SMS reminders increased cervical screening participation by around 5%.
Based on these findings, the NHS across London rolled out text message reminders, which saw a similar rise of 4.8% in cervical screening uptake, equivalent of 13,400 more women being screened as a result of the campaign.
Dr Sarah HufHonorary Clinical Research Fellow, Institute of Global Health Innovation “Given the likely detrimental impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on cancer screening rates across the UK, simple interventions such as text message reminders could support efforts to increase cervical screening as services resume normal practice.”
The researchers tested a number of different text messages to find out whether the specific content could make a difference to attendance rates. These included standard reminders to book an appointment, messages that were endorsed by the participants’ GP practice, texts that highlighted potential benefits of screening or costs of not being screened and messages relaying the local proportion, or number of women being screened (social norms).
Rates were highest in those who received a standard reminder or a GP-endorsed text, both of which saw around a 5% increase in participation. Slightly more women also attended screening if they were sent a text framed around potential losses or gains, but attendance was not significantly higher than for those who were not sent a text message.
The researchers from Imperial College London’s Institute of Global Health Innovation are now extending their work to find out whether the specific wording of text message reminders can influence rates of breast screening.
Dr Sarah Huf, lead author and Honorary Clinical Research Fellow at IGHI, said: “Not only do text message reminders improve cervical screening rates, our results indicate that what we write in the message matters.”
“We hope that this low-cost intervention will be adopted beyond London. Given the likely detrimental impact of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic on cancer screening rates across the UK, simple interventions such as text message reminders could support efforts to increase cervical screening as services resume normal practice.”
Dr Gaby Judah, study author and Lecturer in Behavioural Sciences at IGHI, said: “Our study suggests that messages endorsed by a person’s GP can be effective at increasing cervical screening uptake, but also that a simple reminder can be as good as or better than many other type of messages that we studied.”
“We’re delighted that our findings have already been implemented in a successful pilot campaign in London, which we hope will be extended so that more women can benefit from cervical screening, which we know saves lives. In order to make the most of the impact that SMS reminders can have on uptake, it will be important for services to have up-to-date phone numbers for their patients.”
The messages were sent using iPlato, and it cost around just £0.03 to send a text.
