It is a forty-foot vehicle with a waiting area, a changing room, and a digital mammography suite, and for the last eighteen months it has spent its weeks parked outside supermarkets, churches, two libraries, and one very obliging laundromat.

In the four postcodes it visits most often, screening rates had been drifting down for six years. They are now up 31 percent against the 2024 baseline.

Why a bus

Because the barrier was never the scan. It was the Tuesday.

A screening mammogram takes about twenty minutes. Getting to it, for someone working an hourly job without paid time off, can take most of a day: a bus, a transfer, a waiting room, and a return trip. For a preventive test on someone who feels perfectly well, that is a large ask, and a lot of people quietly decline to make it.

Parking the scanner where people already are removes the day and leaves the twenty minutes.

I had put it off three years running. I did it because it was there and I had already parked.

A patient at the Ocean Vista site, quoted with permission

What the schedule looks like

The unit runs a fixed rota rather than a roaming one, and that turned out to matter. In the first six months it went wherever it was invited, and attendance was unpredictable. Since it settled into a repeating pattern — the same car park, the same day of the week, every fortnight — attendance has been steady and word of mouth has done most of the work.

31%Rise in screening rate
2,740Scans in eighteen months
9Regular stops on the rota

Results, and the awkward part

Images are read the same day by the same radiologists who read the hospital's. A normal result is a text message within 48 hours. Anything needing a second look is a phone call, not a letter, and the follow-up appointment is offered during that call.

The awkward part is that a mobile unit cannot do the second look. Diagnostic imaging and biopsy happen at Winterfield Medical Center, which is the very journey the bus exists to avoid. For anyone in that position we arrange transport, and we do it without being asked, because a woman who has just been told she needs further imaging should not also have to solve a bus timetable.

Using the unit

  • Screening mammography only, for women 40 and over, or earlier with a referral.
  • Appointments preferred, walk-ins accepted when the list allows.
  • No cost with most insurance; nobody is turned away for inability to pay.
  • The rota is published a month ahead and does not change without notice.
  • Transport to follow-up imaging is arranged for anyone who needs it.

A second unit

Funding for a second vehicle was approved in April. It will cover the north and east of the county, where the current unit reaches roughly one week in six. Delivery is expected in early 2027.