Breast cancer screening barriers from women’s perspective: a systematic review in qualitative studies and critical appraisal

Background: The principal aim of the health service providers in the field of breast cancer is to detect and treat breast cancer in the appropriate time. Therefore, identification of the barriers to screening can be very helpful. the present study aims to systematically review the qualitative studies for extracting and reporting the screening barriers to breast cancer from women’s prospective.Methods: In this systematic review; Pubmed, Google Scholar, Ovid Scopus, Cochrane Library, Iranmedex, and SID were searched using the keywords: screening barriers, cancer, qualitative studies, Breast and their Persian equivalents, and the needed data were extracted and analyzed using the extraction table. To assess the quality of the studies, the Critical Appraisal Skills Programme (CASP) tool was used.Results: from 2134 found related articles, 21 articles were eventually included in the study. The most important barriers from the point of view of 1084 women respectively were: lack of knowledge, access barriers (financial, geographical, cultural), fear (of results and pain), performance of service providers, women’s beliefs, procrastination of screening, embarrassment, long wait for getting an appointment, language problems, and previous negative experiences. Articles’ assessment score was 68.91.Conclusion: increasing women’s knowledge, reducing the costs of screening services, screening service culture promotion, presentation of less painful methods, change of beliefs of health service providers, provision of private environment for service giving, decreasing the waiting time for getting an appointment, and providing high quality service and appropriate behavior can be effective ways to increase breast cancer screening.

Keywords:

breast cancer , screening , barriers , women’s prospective , qualitative studies