Abstract
Objective: At our facility, we are making efforts to raise the percentage of examinees undergoing further examinations, focusing on cancer screening. Since 2010, we have been studying effective methods of encouraging people to undergo further examinations and have improved working procedures. We studied the effectiveness of these methods.
Methods: We made it a necessary requirement to issue referral letters to examinees deemed to need further examination in health check-up cancer screening. In addition to encouraging examinees to undergo further examinations in interviews with public health nurses, in order to provide appropriate information on medical institutions, various tools for were made available, such as a list of referral medical institutions and tablet computers. Furthermore, when the further examination status (i.e. undergone or not) or their results were not known, we conducted a follow-up investigation 6 months after the health check-up.
Results: We compared the further examination rates for each year, beginning in 2010. In 2010 and 2011, the rates increased for all examinations. Comparing 2011 with 2009, the increase in the stomach X ray examination rate in 2012 was 30.9%, the biggest increase. Next came, fecal occult blood, chest X ray, cervical cytology, breast cancer and gastroscopy examinations, in that order, with increases of 27.6%, 24.2%, 16.0%, 14.7% and 10.8%, respectively.
Conclusion: Our findings suggested that encouragement from doctors and public health nurses and the provision of information on medical institutions on the day of the health check-up could motivate examinees to undergo further examinations. Also, issuing referral letters and conducting follow-up investigations were effective in increasing the rate of knowing the further examination status as well as the percentage of examinees undergoing further examinations. Future issues to be addressed are raising the effectiveness of interviews with public health nurses and improving response rates for questionnaires used in follow-up investigations.
