The health software system is not set up for people of various genders to undergo cervical screenings

Clunie said this does not necessarily mean revising current information, but making other forms available.

In a statement, a spokesperson for Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand said training and education was being developed for healthcare professionals, “along with resources to meet the needs of LGBTQI+ communities”.

“Work is underway to help further reduce barriers to cervical screening.”

Manual control: when the software does not communicate with the patient

Invitations and reminders for cervical screening are handled by individual primary care providers.

Hobsonville Family Doctors GP Dr Torrance Merkle said much of the problem was due to healthcare providers using different software, which handled gender and sex identification differently.

Merkle also explained that there are other “complexities” for these systems to communicate with the broader national health system.

He said any issues involved trying to manually override the system “as much as possible”. This meant every two years, in person, reviewing what a patient needed and what they might have missed.

“You just have to be careful and make sure things are done: the systems are not as reliable.”

Another GP, Dr Zoe Suttor, uses software that allows patients to be recalled based on their assigned sex at birth.

She said having to work through systems manually meant patients could fall through the cracks and pointed out that software designs made it “more difficult to provide equitable health care to a group that already has poorer health outcomes”.

Suttor also said that manually overriding the system isn’t necessarily a permanent fix, with reminder systems possibly going back to being incorrect if the patient changes healthcare providers and the gender markers need to be changed again. manually.

“I think it’s much more common for that [gender markers] entered incorrectly and badly”.

Switch from smear to swab

From July 2023, the National Cervical Screening Program will switch to a human papillomavirus (HPV) test as the main screening method, which will include the option of swab self-testing.

As a result, screening would change from a three-year interval to a five-year interval.

Dr Torrance Merkle said it would be “a really useful change” because the current method of opening the vagina with a speculum and then using a brush to take a sample of cells from the surface of the cervix, was “quite invasive”.

Moira Clunie said the changes offered “real opportunities” to work with communities who may not have had access to or delayed cervical screening.

However, they stressed that while this would reduce barriers to cervical screening, a future test change would not solve the software issues at hand.

The spokesperson for Health New Zealand said a campaign around testing change was still being developed and would include “examining ways to help people of diverse gender identities access testing services “.

The spokesperson also said the systems being developed under the new National Health Entity would support gender diversity and gender self-identification, while allowing people to be notified for the cervical screening even if they were not registered in general medicine.

RNZ