Knowledge and recommendations regarding breast cancer early screening in an upper middle income country: Primary and secondary health care professionals

•An Official Standard for breast cancer prevention does not guarantee its practice.•Health care professionals are unaware of the breast cancer prevention standard.•In a survey, the responses in accordance with the Mexican Standard was 38%.•Strategies to enforce breast cancer preventive policies should be proposed.

ObjectiveTo compare the current breast cancer prevention and control Mexican standard with recommendations that health care professionals provide to women for breast self-exams, clinical breast exams and mammography, as well as health care professional knowledge of the risk factors for and main clinical signs of the disease.MethodsIn 2012, using a cross-sectional design, trained interviewers surveyed health care providers in a sample of 798 medical units, of which 756 corresponded to the first and second levels of medical care. One health care professional from each unit was interviewed for the study. The sampling method was systematic and representative of the national and regional levels. Relative frequencies and 95% confidence intervals (CI) were obtained using the weighting factor assigned to each medical unit.ResultsRegarding the indicator about recommendations provided to the population regarding early screening for and risk factors and clinical signs of breast cancer, the average number of health care professional responses in accordance with the Mexican standard was 10.7 (95% CI 10.0–11.4) out of a maximum of 28 points, which corresponds to an average rate of 38.2% of responses (95% CI 35.6–40.8). The percentage of correct answers increased in all areas of breast exam knowledge as training hours in the previous year increased.ConclusionsHealth care professionals are unaware of the current standards on breast cancer; therefore, these recommendations are not routinely translated into health care practice, which is a barrier to increasing the coverage of screening programs in health care services.