Both were unveiled on Tuesday at the Dr. Laura Ayres Regional Public Health Laboratory in Almancil, in the presence of the Assistant State Secretary for Health Fernando Araújo.
In his speech, the Assistant Secretary of State for Health praised the work of all health professionals involved in these projects and stressed that “today is a historic day for the Algarve Region with the launch of the colon and rectum cancer screening programme”, explaining it was trialled last year in the North, and is also being introduced in Lisbon as well as in the Algarve.
“We hope that all pilot projects carried out this year test, validate, and are expanded to all other health centres. In 2018, the objective is to completely cover all regions in the country in terms of colon and rectal screening.
“We aim to achieve two things: to increase the number of cases detected early on, and, in doing this, to treat patients earlier on, increasing survival rates by five years and reducing National Health Service expenditure, which is very high in terms of cancer”, Fernando Araújo explained.
From this week, patients of the Ria Formosa Family Health Unit in Faro, and the São Brás de Alportel Health Centre, aged between 50 and 75, some 7,000 patients in total, will start receiving letters inviting them for a colorectal cancer check-up, in a move that has been promised for the Algarve for over a decade.
The programme is still in an embryonic phase, but should be extended to all health centres in the region from the start of next year.
The new Mobile Breast Cancer Screening Unit, equipped with Tomosynthesis and Computer Assisted Diagnosis (CAD), is unique at national and European level, and makes the Algarve the first region in the country to carry out screenings with this latest generation technology.
It will allow the rate of detection of breast cancers to be significantly increased, reduce false positives, and the number of women called for follow-up consultations, and reduce the dose of radiation applied in each examination as well as reducing programme costs.