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The federal government has tapped a Calgary-based physician to lead a national advisory committee on preventive health services, and one advocate is hopeful it will lead to significant updates to the national guidelines for breast cancer screening.
On Wednesday, the Public Health Agency of Canada announced the National Advisory Committee on Preventive Health Services (NACPHS). It replaces a task force that was launched in 2009 to develop preventive health services guidelines and screening recommendations for conditions like cervical and breast cancer.
The 14-member committee is led by Dr. David Keegan, a family physician and professor with the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine.
“I honour the work that the task force before us has done,” Keegan said on Friday. “This is a new phase where we get to — with really laser focus — work on how do we make sure that we maximize the health potential of everyone.”
The decision around the previous task force came down in 2025 following an external review based on concerns from cancer specialists, family doctors and patients about the task force using outdated research or being slow to update its guidelines, particularly when it came to breast cancer screening.
Dr. David Keegan has been selected as the chair of the National Advisory Committee on Public Health Services. He is also a family physician and professor at the University of Calgary’s Cumming School of Medicine. (Stacey Watson)
Experts and advocates had recommended lowering the age for mammograms to 40. Despite the task force keeping the recommended age at 50, many provinces started offering, or committed to offering, publicly-funded mammograms for women from the age of 40 or 45.
Alberta recently announced it is lowering the age at which women can self-refer for a mammogram to 40, but the change doesn’t come into effect until April 1, 2027.
Opportunities for change, new chair says
Keegan said it’s important for the new committee to examine what has worked in preventive health guidance in the past and “learn from where it’s gone wrong.”
“We need to ensure that we re-examine our methodology and ensure that we make sure that for any topic that we’re exploring that we’ve got the right methodology in place to answer the questions we’re looking for,” he said.
Part of that re-examination involves determining which topics are most pressing, Keegan said, which the committee is expected to do within the next month when it begins outlining its priorities.
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“Breast cancer screening, for instance, I don’t see how that would not be a priority of the first set of priorities that we do,” Keegan said.
“But we can do things in parallel. We don’t have to do things in linear,” he added. “I think another essential task we’re going to have to do is scan what kinds of topics have been explored before and need updating.”
The federal government says the new committee includes members with diverse expertise and backgrounds, including family doctors, specialists and experts in Black and Indigenous health.
Keegan said he also sees an opportunity for the committee to be “more modular and nimble” in updating its guidelines more frequently as new information becomes available. The previous task force re-examined its guidelines every five years.
“We’re going to be figuring out how to make sure that our work is as transparent as possible so [Canadians] can see what we’re doing and can ask tough questions,” he said.
‘Going to touch every single Canadian’
For Calgarian Natalie Kwadrans, the new committee is a welcome announcement.
Kwadrans was diagnosed with Stage 4 breast cancer in 2019. At the time, she was too young to qualify for a screening mammogram in Alberta and has been pushing to lower the national screening age ever since.
“I’m really optimistic that this new advisory committee will take a look at where things were standing just before the Canadian task force got disbanded and will pick up and work on the breast cancer screening guidelines pretty urgently because we need an update,” she said.
Although the screening age has been lowered in many provinces, Kwadrans said, it is still crucial for there to be national guidance, not just for breast cancer screening but for all other health conditions the committee looks at.
“It’s not just breast cancer screening, it’s prostate [cancer], it’s depression, it’s Alzheimer’s, it’s diabetes — all of these other illnesses,” she said.
“You start building that out and you go, ‘Wow, this is really going to touch every single Canadian.'”