They will carefully examine your breasts to feel for lumps, swellings or anything else unusual.

They may then decide to send you to a specialist doctor at a nearby hospital. There are NHS cancer referral guidelines to help GPs decide who needs to see a specialist, and how quickly.

Alternatively, you may be asked to go to the hospital after a routine breast screening test.

If you need to go to the hospital it doesn't mean you are sure to have cancer. It simply means that the doctor needs to do some more tests to find out what is causing your symptoms. If you have been for breast screening, there may be something on the X-ray that needs to be checked out, but often there is nothing wrong, so try not to worry unduly.

One way of finding out whether a patient has breast cancer is to carry out three tests: clinical examination, imaging and fine needle aspiration. Together these are called the triple assessment.

Clinical examination

Your specialist doctor will ask you questions and then examine you.

Imaging

This will be:

• A mammogram (an X-ray of your breast).
  
   
• An ultrasound scan. This test uses sound waves to build a picture of the inside of the body. You lie on your back while a device like a microphone is passed over your breast. The sound waves then make pictures of your breast on a computer screen.

Fine needle aspiration

For this test a fine needle is passed through the skin and into the breast lump, to get a sample of cells. The sample is then sent to the laboratory to be looked at under a microscope. Sometimes another needle test – a core biopsy – is also needed. For this, you have a local anaesthetic and a small cut is made in the skin. A needle is used to take out a small piece of breast tissue.

The triple assessment correctly diagnoses breast cancer in almost all cases – but in one out of every 500 cases it will miss the cancer. One reason for this is that not all breast cancers can be seen on an X-ray. Another problem is that some people have dense breasts that the X-ray can't penetrate.

Your doctor may decide that you don't need to have all the tests in the triple assessment before a diagnosis can be made. Your doctor will tell you which tests you will have.