Some of us are fielding phone calls from our 70+ patients who received a letter recommending they have HPV screening – despite having prior normal pap testing and meeting the cytology based screening cessation criteria.
As part of the implementation of the new HPV testing letter campaign, between March 7-24, some people aged 69+ were incorrectly sent a letter from Ontario Health (Cancer Care Ontario). They apologize for any confusion this may have caused. I am assured that the issue has now been resolved.
Please advise any patients who had previously met the cytology-based cessation criteria and who received a recall letter that they do not need to be screened. The previous Ontario Cervical Screening Program (OCSP) cytology-based screening recommendations state that someone can stop cervical screening at age 70 if they have 3 negative routine screening cytology results in the previous 10 years. With the implementation of HPV testing, any patient who had previously met the cytology-based cessation criteria does not need to be screened again with HPV testing.
For more information about screening cessation, please refer to question #25 in the HPV Testing FAQs available on the HPV Testing Implementation Hub (ontariohealth.ca/HPVhub).
-Dr. Meghan Davis