Professor Arnold Hill:

Triple assessment is when a woman is referred to us with a lump. She is examined, we get imaging at the same time, and we also do a diagnostic biopsy. There are the three components: the clinical component where the woman is examined; the imaging component; and then the analysis of the biopsy. That is the gold standard in diagnosing a breast cancer. This is why we set up triple assessment clinics and we identify patients who are most likely to have breast cancer to be in that very small selected cohort. We do that from the referral information we get from the GP.

If we go back to the original information that was given to the committee by Professor Flanagan, breast cancer is so rare in a 30-year-old that one would not set up a triple assessment clinic for 30-year-olds. It would be more beneficial to have a triple assessment clinic for someone who is of an older age and more likely to have breast cancer. When one is putting all those resources together, the clinician, the imaging, the radiologist and the pathologist, one needs to make sure that it is the most effective use of all those critical resources. We are more likely to have people of an older profile in a triple assessment clinic. One would never set up a triple assessment clinic for 30-year-olds because we would we would be seeing several thousand people but probably seeing a breast cancer there only once a year. That would not be a good use of our time or our resources.