Let's open the waitlist

I'm overdue is a response to developing information about serious capacity and prioritisation problems affecting people who normally receive regular surveillance for bowel cancer and pre-cancer (polyps). These are people with greatly increased risk for cancer, such as people with a genetic predisposition syndrome like Lynch Syndrome.

It's a way for people who are overdue for their regular surveillance screening to share their statuses all in one place so we can see just how many people are affected.

Perhaps you normally get booked in like clockwork but it hasn't happened this year? Were you told by a GP that there are very long wait times for colonoscopies, as long as 6 to 9 months? Maybe you received a letter saying that surveillance colonoscopies have been put on pause without any indication of when they will resume?

If any of these sound familiar — this website is for you!

FAQ

Hi 👋 — My name is Matt. I've been living with Lynch Syndrome technically all of my life, but I only knew about it once I was old enough get the test at 18.

I was very lucky to have known about it then, as some in my family who didn't have this information developed cancer at a very young age. It's fair to say that access to regular surveillance colonoscopies is likely to have significantly improved (if not saved) my life by snipping out sketchy looking polyps before they become a problem.

The due date for my screening flew by this year and I didn't get a call to book my appointment like I always do. After talking to my GP about it I was very surprised to learn that I might not get booked on time at all.

As someone in the same boat as others — I'm concerned about the impact these issues might be having on people and I wanted to use my skillset to do something that might at the very least help other people have somewhere to channel their frustration.

It's really about giving people a voice. The goal for I'm overdue was simply to allow people to raise public awareness about the issue, and let people say how long they have been waiting for their regular screenings.

This meant collecting two important things, an email to make sure that submissions are made by real people (through an email verification flow), and a screening due date to calculate the overdue status.

Beyond this, at some point the data will get stale, so I intend to send some 'check-in' reminder emails every 3 months where you can say that you've been booked in or if you're still waiting. That way we can keep the overdue values fresh but also you get a little bonus reminder to follow things up if you forget (I know how one month can easily turn into two, and two into three before I even realise!).

I don't like the idea of collecting and keeping data around if it isnt needed, so I've thought hard about what might be useful to know as far as anonymous stats go to help surface certain trends in the data (optional location / region could help to highlight places where things are more broken) and how to make sure the submissions look like they're from real human beings (optional name, age etc).

That's why most of the fields are optional — you choose to volunteer exactly how much information you're comfortable with (and you can edit it at any time).

I will never use the information collected to do anything outside of these goals, and if it seems like things get fixed and stay that way (bookings, capacity and waitlists returning to normal with very low numbers of people overdue) — my intention would be to wipe the database.

At the moment it's hard to tell just how this might be impacting people and where. Because we are a small minority, chances are you don't know too many other people in a similair situation outside a few family members and so it's hard to know who else is experiencing trouble with getting a booking.

Very little information has been shared. I hope it helps by allowing us to see the size of the problem by getting people to share their experience in a small but quantifiable way.

I also hope that doing this helps to put pressure on the medical community to share more information with us, and to ultimately rectify the situation. After all they are the ones who know about the decisions made and the impact it has on health outcomes.

If no one speaks up, nothing will happen.

Hopefully it also helps a little to know that there other people out there sharing in the same stress.

Of course! contact@imoverdue.co.nz

I've tried to keep things on the website general enough to cover most situations without being too vague — but if you feel something here doesn't quite cater to your situation please get in touch.