Performance of nurses in the Department of Health as service providers for a cervical screening programme.

A territory-wide cervical screening programme was launched in Hong Kong in March 2004. Since 2002, 160 nurses from the Department of Health's Maternal and Child Health Centres have completed the training necessary to carry out the screening procedures. A clinical audit of their performance was carried out between 2002 and 2004. A customer satisfaction survey revealed that 94% of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that they were satisfied with the cervical smear procedure performed by nurses. Since January 2003, all routine cervical screening tests at Maternal and Child Health Centres have been performed by nurses. The mean time required to complete a test is 7 minutes. The mean unsatisfactory smear rate for the year 2003 was 1.3%, well below the benchmark of 5% set by the Working Party on Quality Assurance of the Cervical Screening Task Force. The results of this survey confirm that nurses at Maternal and Child Health Centres are highly effective and efficient at taking smears and that this is well accepted by clients.