This data was provided by the Minister of Health, Paulette Lenert, in response to a parliamentary question from the CSV. The waiting time varies not only from hospital to hospital, but also whether one takes appointment in the context of the regular organised mammography programme, or whether one takes an individual screening for breast cancer.
For example, one can take one’s turn at the CHL after just one week and in two months at the latest. At the Robert Schuman Hospital, the waiting time is supposed to be one and a half months, and at the Centre Hospitalier due Nord, at least three months.
The picture is completely different if you have to have a mammography on an individual basis, for example on the advice of a gynaecologist. In this case, Ettelbruck and the Robert Schuman Hospital are the quickest, i.e. in one and a half or two months. At the CHL and the Chem in Esch you can wait up to a year, the time frame spans from two to twelve months.
Paulette Lenert explains that the waiting times are due to a lack of staff in the radiology department. There is also the fact that more and more individual screenings are being conducted outside the mammography programme. In the last three years, these have accounted for 27% of the tests.
The mammography programme is aimed at women between 50 and 69 years of age. The scientific council of the Ministry of Health believes that within the ‘standard’ risk framework for breast cancer, there was no need for imaging screening outside the 50-69 age group.
