Andalusian Breast Cancer Screening Program Faces Scrutiny

The early detection program for breast cancer has benefited millions of women in Andalusia since its launch in 1995 – 1.3 million are currently active – and it has never been free of suspicion about its ability to improve, despite the significant progress it has made in reducing aggressive treatments and, above all, its indisputable success due to the lives it has saved.

The archive of the jurisprudence of the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) contains dozens of rulings issued in the last two decades that rule on appeals presented mostly by the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) to decisions from lower-order judicial bodies that agree with dissatisfied cancer patients – or their relatives, if they have died due to a delay in treatment.

The dysfunctions of the plan against breast tumors that the Government of Andalusia activated in 1995 are, thus, not new, even though it is indeed now that criticism is intensifying as 2,000 women with a doubtful diagnosis have not received precise information about the status of their disease.

Some of the cases on which the autonomous High Court reasons are similar to those that have unleashed a health and political crisis in Andalusia as the beginning of this month. For example: the family of G., a woman who was dealing with a tumor in the Virgen del Rocío Hospital in Seville since the end of the 90s, managed to get a court of first instance to recognize compensation on behalf of the SAS in the amount of 148,832 euros for malpractice that caused the death of the woman in 2007 from metastatic carcinoma.

Tracking Interrupted

The Andalusian Health Service appealed the ruling and appealed to the TSJA, which once again ruled in favor of the patient’s relatives. The Superior court of justice argues in the ruling that “the expert affirms that it is indeed contrary to normal protocols, after an oncological process, to interrupt follow-up for two years, during which period it is moast likely that a disease would develop; which, according to it, constitutes bad practice.

And it adds: «The report [del perito] says that the April 2004 marker index was not very meaningful, which did not advise blind testing at that time; He also adds that the correct thing would have been to repeat the analysis shortly after, which there is no evidence that was done.