Table 4.

Representative quotes from interviews related to ‘Ethically Mindful’ concept

ETHICALLY MINDFUL — considering the effects of the ‘nimble response’. Programme access challenges—delays, bottlenecks created in programme process (invitations, testing, diagnosis, capacity management) and quality assurance concerns (emotional well-being and safety of programme patients).
… and we measure and evaluate the quality of the programme in every step of the process. So the concept is that cancer screening is a process. First of all, its population based and organised…. Number 2, it’s not a single test, it’s a process. It’s a series of steps and as we run and operate the programme we measure and report on the quality and performance of every step in the path.	PR4 P1
It became very clear early on in the pandemic that colonoscopy had just stopped. People weren’t getting colonoscopies, except under extreme emergency situations. And it became, you know, pretty clear that we were building up a backlog of people who weren’t going to get their colonoscopy for the foreseeable future…. I think it’s ethically unsound to say to somebody, “You’ve got a positive test but it’s not very positive, so you’ll just have to wait” because you’re going to engender a lot of anxiety by doing that.	PR2 P12
…in some smaller communities there weren’t any cases of COVID-19. And so those smaller centres wanted to continue with screening…. I think that was a bit difficult for places where they basically had no COVID-19. They knew there were these patients waiting to have colonoscopies done and they weren’t working. They had all these staff, all of these nurses at the endoscopy clinic, these physicians that didn’t have anyone to scope. And they felt like, you know, these resources are so precious to us because, you know, they’re limited, that they were being wasted now.	PR5 P6