Currently women cannot see their breast cancer screening status - i.e. the date of the last / next screening. This costs lives.

There are cracks in NHS breast screening and women keep being missed. The screening exists for one reason alone, to reduce mortality, to save lives. Where women are missed, it's no exaggeration to say that lives which could have been saved are lost.

In 2018 there was an internal and an independent review into NHS routine breast cancer screening after over one hundred and twenty thousand women were not invited to final screening appointments. Many of them suspected they had missed an appointment, none of them, nor their GPs, raised the alarm. It was only discovered by work on a trial looking at extending the screening age.

This wasn't an isolated case. The review found 5000 further women who had been missed, not through policy or IT failure, but through administrative error.

Hundreds of women at higher genetic risk were missed by NHS Lothian earlier this year due to administrative error.

And one woman was missed recently when after moving house she called her new GP surgery to check she was on the waiting list for screening. This is the only way women can query whether they are on the list. She was told she was on the list. She wasn't.

So now my mum has an aggressive form of breast cancer, triple negative breast cancer at stage three. The screening programme missed a potential opportunity to catch her cancer at an earlier stage. The cold truth is that we don’t know how much further this problem goes. Routine screening can't help my mum today, but it can still help others.

Each of these disasters is addressed in isolation. The truth is the screening algorithms are too complicated for people to understand, to reason about the batches of women called forward and the barrier to checking screening status is too high and too error prone across the entirety of NHS screening.

I think there's a quick and cheap way to add a layer of redundancy, a safety net that could prevent many of these.

Just give women the access to their own screening dates. Then they'll know if they're overdue, they'll have something concrete to point to if it says they're not on the list, or if the date doesn't look right. They'll be able to query their screening and in doing so that of others before they find a lump, or potentially worse, don't. After all, this is their data, they should be able to access it at any time, day or night, regardless of whether the GP surgery is closed or the phone lines are busy.

The DVLA have done this for car tax for nearly 15 years and no one dies if you miss that date.

I've tried NHS front door emails, but I can't get an answer. An MP offered me the chance to enter a giveaway for a cookbook. I think women in the UK deserve a decent answer. Sign the petition and demand this data is given back to those who own it, before any one further loses a loved one unnecessarily. And please do share the petition - if we sign it but it isn't widely seen we won't get the necessary traction for change.