Background: Cervical cancer screening rates are known to be strongly associated with socioeconomic status. Our objective was to assess whether the rate is also associated with an aggregated deprivation marker, defined by the location of family doctors' offices.
Methods: To access this association, we 1) collected data from the claim database of the French Health Insurance Fund about the registered family doctors and their enlisted female patients eligible for cervical screening; 2) carried out a telephone survey with all registered doctors to establish if they were carrying out Pap-smears in their practices; 3) geotracked all the doctors' offices in the smallest existing blocks of socioeconomic homogenous populations (IRIS census units) that were assigned a census derived marker of deprivation, the European Deprivation Index (EDI), and a binary variable of urbanization; and 4) we used a multivariable linear mixed model with IRIS as a random effect.
Results: Of 348 eligible doctors, 343 responded to the telephone survey (98.6%) and were included in the analysis, encompassing 88,152 female enlisted patients aged 25-65 years old. In the multivariable analysis (adjusted by the gender of the family doctor, the practice of Pap-smears by the doctor and the urbanization of the office location), the EDI of the doctor's office was strongly associated with the cervical cancer screening participation rate of eligible patients (p<0.001).
Conclusion: The EDI linked to the location of the family doctor's office seems to be a robust marker to predict female patients' participation in cervical cancer screening.