Screening mammography uptake within Australia and Scotland in rural and urban populations

• Scotland and Australia provide free screening mammography for their populations.
• Women living in rural areas can attend screening mammography via mobile units.
• We examined rural–urban breast screening rates in Scotland and Australia.
• Rural women were not less likely to attend screening mammography than urban women.
• Rurality is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier to health service access.

ObjectiveTo test the hypothesis that rural populations had lower uptake of screening mammography than urban populations in the Scottish and Australian setting.MethodScottish data are based upon information from the Scottish Breast Screening Programme Information System describing uptake among women residing within the NHS Highland Health Board area who were invited to attend for screening during the 2008 to 2010 round (N = 27,416). Australian data were drawn from the 2010 survey of the 1946–51 cohort of the Australian Longitudinal Study on Women's Health (N = 9890 women).ResultsContrary to our hypothesis, results indicated that women living in rural areas were not less likely to attend for screening mammography compared to women living in urban areas in both Scotland (OR for rural = 1.17, 95% CI = 1.06–1.29) and Australia (OR for rural = 1.15, 95% CI = 1.01–1.31).ConclusionsThe absence of rural–urban differences in attendance at screening mammography demonstrates that rurality is not necessarily an insurmountable barrier to screening mammography.