A Novel Breast Screening Attendance Predictor Variable Based on Distance Travelled to Screening Facility

Breast cancer is a high mortality disease for which a cure is still out of reach to modern medicine. The only viable preventive mechanism available is breast screening. Nonattendance has been the biggest impediment that has plagued many publicly funded breast screening programs. Physicians´ intervention has been accepted as one of the reliable countermeasures aimed at increasing screening attendance. A prediction tool would focus on and benefit these interventions only on the non-attendees instead of the whole screening population. A number of predictors have been proposed for making efficient predictions. This paper discusses one such predictor attribute, based on distance travelled from screening women´s residence to the screening facility. We further test the attribute on an actual dataset and present the results.