MSPGH seminar: The National Lung Cancer Screening Program – One Year Anniversary
Australia’s National Lung Cancer Screening Program (NLCSP) launched on 1 July 2025 — the country’s first new cancer screening program in two decades, and its first targeted cancer screening program.
The Program uses low-dose computed tomography (CT) scans to detect lung cancer in people at high risk. Its first year represents a major milestone in the early detection of lung cancer, with the potential to save thousands of lives.
To mark the anniversary, a Melbourne School of Population and Global Health (MSPGH) seminar on 21 July 2026 brought together two leading experts in cancer screening, Professor Dorota Gertig and Professor Nicole Rankin, to reflect on the Program’s first year.
Professor Gertig, Medical Director of the National Cancer Screening Register (NCSR) at Telstra Health, described the national infrastructure underpinning the Program. The NCSR invites and reminds eligible participants, applies nationally consistent clinical rules to follow up screen-detected abnormalities, and connects general practice, radiology, and pathology to a single participant record.
In the Program’s first year:
- more than 100,000 eligible participants enrolled
- more than 100,000 low-dose CT scans were received by the Register
- more than 230 primary lung cancers were diagnosed
- missing radiology results fell from 37% to under 5%, following sustained engagement withthe radiology sector.
Professor Rankin set the Program in a longer context, tracing the international research history behind lung cancer screening and its implementation, noting that Australia is one of only 13 countries with a national or jurisdictional lung cancer screening program.
A timeline of Australian research and policy change showed how the evidence moved into practice — a sequence in which Professor Rankin has been directly involved over several years, with collaborators across research, clinical practice, and government. Her contributions range from leading the evidence review for the 2020 Lung Cancer Screening Enquiry through to the Program Guidelines, now published open access in the MJA: Program Guidelines for the National Lung Cancer Screening Program: Targeted Lung Cancer Screening in High‐Risk Individuals in Australia.
Professor Rankin outlined the lung cancer screening implementation research program at MSPGH, which has built the pre-implementation evidence base over several years — focus groups with healthcare professionals, policymakers, and people from culturally and linguistically diverse communities; a qualitative study of what motivates high-risk individuals to participate in screening; a discrete choice experiment with 757 potentially eligible people, which found that navigators, personalised invitations, and lower out-of-pocket costs were the strongest drivers of uptake; and parallel work on embedding smoking cessation support within screening.
That program of work led to the MRFF-funded Ready to Screen trial — the first Australian study to rigorously test invitation strategies for lung cancer screening. Ready to Screen is a cluster-randomised implementation trial across 38 general practices in Victoria and New South Wales, involving 17,886 invitations. Professor Rankin presented preliminary economic evaluation findings showing the bundled implementation strategy to be more costly but substantially more effective than the core strategy — evidence directly relevant to government decisions about scaling equitable access. Main effectiveness results were presented at the World Conference on Lung Cancer in Seoul in September 2026. The open access trial protocol is published in Implementation Science.
Prof Nicole Rankin acknowledging the inequity of lung cancer and the contributions of lung cancer advocate, the late Ms Lorraine Tyler (1964—2024)
Left to right: Prof Adam Elshaug, Dr Miranda Siemienowicz, Prof Dorota Gertig, Prof Nicole Rankin.
Article prepared by Rebecca Zosel.
Note: A recording of this seminar is not available.