1. You order
Orders are placed through our shop and dispatched the same or next working day. Delivery is free within the UK and the packaging is deliberately plain: a padded envelope with nothing on the outside indicating what is inside. Nobody at your address or workplace will know what has arrived.
Not sure a bowel screening test is right for you? Take the two-minute check first.
2. Your kit arrives
Inside you will find the collection tubes, a stool collection sheet, name labels, a request form and prepaid return packaging that meets UN3373 rules for transporting diagnostic specimens. Read the instructions before you start rather than during. The whole process takes about five minutes, but it is easier if you know the sequence first.
Store the kit somewhere cool and dry between 10 and 25°C, and check the expiry date on the label.
3. You collect your sample
At home, in your own bathroom, with no preparation and no clinic visit. For stool tests, the collection sheet sits on the toilet seat so the sample never touches the bowl or the water. Fill in your name, date of birth and the date of collection on the request form and sign it — a sample without a matching, legible form cannot be processed.
For the ColoAlert bowel cancer test specifically, take small amounts from three or four different places in the sample rather than one spot, and do not overfill the tube. Roughly a pea-sized quantity is right. Once the dosing stick goes back in, leave it there.
4. You post it back
The same day you collect, and only Monday to Thursday. Not Friday, not at a weekend, not before a bank holiday, and never into a letterbox where it will sit until the next collection. This is the single most common cause of an unusable sample: the specimen is fine when it leaves you and degraded by the time it arrives.
Until you post it, keep the sealed sample at room temperature rather than in a fridge.
5. The laboratory analyses it
ColoAlert samples travel to biovis Diagnostik MVZ GmbH in Germany, a laboratory accredited to DIN EN ISO 15189. Our other tests go to their respective manufacturers' accredited laboratories in the UK and Europe. Analysis is quantitative and performed to the laboratory's own validated specifications.
6. You get your result
About ten days from posting — two to three days in transit and seven laboratory days — sent as a password-protected document. The report explains what was measured and what the numbers mean, in language written for you rather than for a clinician.
If anything is abnormal, a GP reviews it and contacts you to discuss it at no additional cost. You will be told plainly what the result does and does not mean, and what the sensible next step is. Where that step is a colonoscopy, you will get written information you can take to your own GP or use to arrange it privately.
