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Stephen Leeder, Commentary: Learning in Lambeth— the South-East London Screening Study revisited, International Journal of Epidemiology, Volume 30, Issue 5, October 2001, Pages 944–945, https://doi.org/10.1093/ije/30.5.944
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As a callow youth from the colonies, I arrived at the Lambeth offices of St Thomas's Hospital Medical School Department of Clinical Epidemiology on a gloomy April Fool's Day 1974, the very day the NHS transmogrified into one of its (subsequently several) new structures. In Lambeth I discovered what Walter Holland and his colleagues had been up to by way of public health research in recent years. Dedicated research staff of eminence and skill were beavering away on projects to do with respiratory health, the health of schoolchildren and screening. I met the screening research workers, saw the data, and even worked on some of it, if with no great consequence, although for a post-doc it was a superb data set with which to 'play' in company with people who, in those early days of information technology, were at the forefront of computational and statistical innovation.
The South-East London Screening Study (SELSS) started in 1967 and was a trial of multiphasic screening for diseases of middle-age.1 It began 2 years before the first man set his foot on the moon. Nine years after the initial screening 'no significant differences were found between the (screened and unscreened) groups in any of the outcome measures' which included hospital admissions, general practice consultations, certified sickness and mortality. Costs of screening were also calculated. Although the total cost of the study is not clear, it influenced policy at the time to avoid the expensive error of publicly supported multiphasic screening. Thus in the light of this study a policy for the use of public money for multiphasic screening would have needed to find justification in intangible or individual benefits not identified by it.
