Following your story about the Oxfordshire breast cancer screening service (Oxford Mail, June 11), the Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals NHS Trust would like to reassure women across the region that quality and patient safety are paramount.

In the face of staffing shortages, the trust discussed the issues with the regional quality assurance assessors for breast screening and made the decision to increase temporarily the gap between women's routine screens.

This was done to maintain the high-quality clinical service for which we are known.

It is safer for women to have a high-quality scan with a high detection rate within a slightly longer time period, than to rush women through the screening process in a way which could mean that early signs of cancer could be overlooked.

Women over the age of 50 are invited to have a routine breast cancer check every three years. Over the past four years the number of women coming to us for breast cancer checks has increased by more than a third.

Staffing shortages have meant that some women have had a delay of up to seven weeks for this check.

It is misleading to suggest that this delay poses a serious risk to health.

However, we have not been complacent and have put an action plan into place to address the delays.

We now have additional staff on the team and have cut delays already. By October, we are confident that there will be no delays.

More importantly, a recent quality check by the South Central Breast Screening Quality Assurance Programme showed that the Oxfordshire breast screening service is of an extremely high quality, with one of the highest detection rates in the country.

The trust has an excellent record in fast-tracking patients with suspected cancer to specialist consultants.

It was, in fact, recently praised by the Department of Health for the speed of access to its cancer services.

RUTH ENGLISH (Dr), Consultant Radiologist Lead Clinician, Breast Screening Unit