National Cervical Screening Program monitoring report 2025

High-grade cervical abnormality detection is the proportion of participants screened that have a high-grade abnormality detected on histology. The detection of high-grade abnormalities is an indicator of program performance. Detection of high-grade abnormalities provides an opportunity for treatment before cancer can develop, thus the NCSP aims to detect high-grade abnormalities in line with its broader aim to reduce the incidence of cervical cancer.

The impact of HPV vaccination on high-grade abnormality detection has been apparent even in the absence of linked data, with the detection rate for participants aged under <20 who historically had the highest detection rate now having the lowest.

For the linked data analysis, a cohort approach was used to allow the HPV vaccination status at the time of the screen could be used across the numerator and denominator. The year 2021 was selected for the cohort, as this was the latest available year in the linked dataset with adequate follow-up time to ensure histology data are complete. As this was a year with a relatively high high-grade cervical abnormality detection rate due to a high proportion of screeners in that year being under-screened or never-screened, these results may differ in future when years in which under-screeners and never-screeners make up a lower proportion of participants.

In 2021, it can be observed that the high-grade cervical detection rate was lower for partially vaccinated and fully vaccinated participants than unvaccinated participants for all age groups from <25 to 40–45 (Table HPV vaccination 3). This is true irrespective of the age at which participants commenced vaccination.

Source: AIHW analysis of linked NCSR and AIR data