It is always a pleasure to attend the Citizen Participation and Public Petitions Committee, and I am pleased that I can speak today in support of the petition by Emma Keyes. A lot of work has gone into getting the petition to this point, and I am grateful to SPICe for its excellent briefing, which sets out that self-sampling is already common in countries such as the Netherlands and Australia, so, in addition to the work that is being done in England and elsewhere in the UK, we have international experience to learn from.
It is important to take a moment to remember why we are here and why the petition is necessary. We know that hundreds of people in Scotland are diagnosed with cervical cancer every year and that, sadly, many of those diagnosed lose their lives. Figures from Jo’s Cervical Cancer Trust show that around 95 people died of the disease in 2023. I take this opportunity to pay tribute to the trust and note that, sadly, the charity has recently had to wind down for reasons that we will not go into today. I know that colleagues know how much it has done to raise awareness of the symptoms as well as of the treatments and the potential that we have to prevent the disease. That is a message of hope today.
The World Health Organization has called for countries to come together to eliminate the disease, and, last year, I was pleased to hear NHS England pledge to eliminate cervical cancer by 2040. Setting out how that could be done, the NHS England chief executive, Amanda Pritchard, outlined how the health service can help to achieve the goal of elimination by making it as easy as possible for people to get the life-saving HPV vaccination and by increasing cervical cancer screening uptake.
That is an important step, because we know that HPV causes up to 99 per cent of cervical cancers. An approach that involves vaccination plus screening plus self-sampling gives us an array of tools that we can use. In England, self-sampling is being trialled to determine whether it should be part of a national screening programme, and the message that campaigners want to send is that, if you get that invitation or opportunity to have that screening, you should take it without delay, as it could save your life. We also know that, for women and people with a cervix who do not take up that offer of screening, the opportunity can be missed, because cervical cancer often has no symptoms in its early stages.
Self-sampling has been identified as a factor that could support the realisation of the World Health Organization’s cervical cancer elimination goals.
As ever, there is always a human story behind petitions, and I pay tribute to my constituent, Emma Keyes, who is sitting behind me in the gallery today. Emma is a young mum from Uddingston in Lanarkshire, and she experienced a shock cervical cancer diagnosis at the age of 29. That would have been debilitating and shocking for many people, but Emma has chosen to use her experience to raise awareness, help women and save lives.
Emma’s message is that cervical cancer is preventable. She has become a bit of an icon online and is known on social media as Mrs Smear. We politicians sometimes think that we are the best message carriers, but Emma can speak to an audience in our community whose attention we cannot always get. She has got not only women talking, but partners, employers, friends, neighbours and families. Such communication is really important, because there are many barriers.
However, the petition is about much more than raising awareness; it is about making sure that our healthcare systems are fit for purpose and that we eliminate barriers to healthcare. The HPV self-sampling trial in Dumfries and Galloway went very well. I know that one of the MSPs in that region, Emma—I have blanked on her name. Emma Harper! I apologise to her—that will now be on the record, so I will say it again: Emma Harper. I know that, as a result of her background in nursing, she was passionate about the subject.
Emma Keyes and I have met two different public health and women’s health ministers, and I thank Maree Todd and Jenny Minto for those meetings. It is really good that the Scottish Government is looking to take advice from the UK National Screening Committee, which was mentioned earlier. However, we also need to work at pace on this. Again, we should look at the experience not just in the UK but around the world.
The pilot scheme that has been mentioned was really important. I know that the pandemic set back a number of initiatives. The convener talked about the year during the pandemic when the number of cases being diagnosed went down because of a lack of screening.
This committee has a strong record on championing women’s health. That is best evidenced in the committee’s role in advancing truth and justice for mesh-injured women. We now have a real opportunity in Parliament to pick up the challenge that has been set by the World Health Organization and to show that Scotland has the necessary expertise and knowledge to do so, and we must not sit back and wait to get the wheels in motion.
I will end by reiterating my support for Emma Keyes’s petition and her campaign. I know that Emma, who is a cervical cancer survivor, at one point feared that she would not live to see her three children grow up. Thankfully, due to our amazing NHS and Emma’s tenacity, she is here to fight and to show others that, even with a dark diagnosis, there is hope. Emma has taught us that we can prevent and eliminate cervical cancer if we use all the tools that are available to us, and that is what the petition is about.
I thank the committee for looking at the petition, and I hope that we can discuss it again in the future.
