The Isle of Man’s bowel cancer screening programme is in line with the same scheme in the UK.

But it may move over to a new form of testing in the future.

Health Minister Kate Beecroft said: ’The Department of Health and Social Care bowel cancer screening programme is fully in line with that in the UK. Call-recall, sending of test kits, analysing completed tests, and sending of results is all commissioned - and delivered - from the UK screening provider.

’This offers economies of scale and rigorous quality assurance.’

She added: ’The UK programme is currently based on the faecal occult blood test (FOBT) but there is a planned roll out to replace this with the faecal immunochemical test (FIT).

’We plan to move to the FIT test when the screening hub providing the testing element of our programme does so. The UK hub does not yet have clarification of either the timescale or resource consequences of this change and therefore we cannot confirm when this will happen here.’

Mrs Beecroft was replying to a written Tynwald question from Dr Alex Allinson (Ramsey) who also sought details of how many bowel cancer screening kits had been sent out over the past three years and what the response rate was, plus how many confirmed cases of bowel cancer there were.

The minister revealed that the number of kits sent out in 2016/17 was 8,773, compared with 6,808 the previous year and 8,523 in 2014/15.

The number of kits returned in 2016/17 was 5,337, an uptake of 60.8%. A similar percentage returned kits in 2015/16, but the rate was higher in 2014/15 with 5,473 returned kits, equating to 64.2%.

There were 60 colonoscopies in 2016/17, with eight cancers detected. In 2015/16, there were 80 colonoscopies, with two cancers detected and in 2014/15 there were 77 colonoscopies, with 10 cancers detected.

The scheme is used for people aged 60-74.

The number of those above that age range who asked for kits in 2016/17 was 125, up on the 2015/16 figure of 93, but below the 2014/15 figure of 224, although that figure includes people over the age of 70, which was then the age limit.