Equity in Screening

We work to improve equity in screening. It's part of our 5 year strategy to enable more people to choose screening.

Understanding screening

Screening is a choice. We want to make it work for everyone.

We want everyone to:

understand what screening is
know what screening can and can’t do
take part in screening if they choose to

We provide information about our 4 screening programmes to help people understand more about screening.

This includes:

Our Equity Projects

These projects aim to address the barriers to screening and to make screening more accessible to everyone.

They are guided by our:

We have 5 priority areas:

research and data
education, learning and development
partnership
access and inclusivity
communications

Research and data

We apply an evidence-based approach to our work. We research to understand why people may not take part in screening so we can understand how to help them make an informed choice.

Find our research on:

Education, learning and development

We support our screening staff, HSE staff and the public to learn about ways to make screening more accessible for everyone.

Equity toolkit

Our equity toolkit aims to empower communities to promote equity in cancer risk reduction, screening and early diagnosis.

Equity toolkit - Empowering communities to promote equity in cancer risk reduction screening and early diagnosis (PDF, 3.4 MB, 8 pages)

Community Champions Health Promotion project

Our Community Champions Health Promotion project aims to build the capacity of community health workers.

We educate and train community health workers to provide practical information and support about screening in their communities.

We’ve published an evaluation of our Community Champions 2024 pilot project.

Interventions toolkit

We’ve developed a toolkit to help support community workers to encourage people to take part in screening. It’s designed for local community health workers who take part in our community champions project and complete our training. The toolkit helps them plan and carry out targeted activities that make screening more accessible and more equitable for everyone.

Interventions toolkit for communities (PDF, 2.75 MB, 37 pages)

Online courses

Our online courses for health and social care professionals support our work to improve equity in screening.

Health promotion team

Our health promotion team deliver education and training about screening to health and social care professionals.

For more information, email health.promotion@screeningservice.ie

Partnership

We work with our screening participants, communities, the public, the HSE, and other organisations to understand the needs of everyone who wants to take part in screening.

Our partnerships include:

Access and inclusivity

We work to identify what stops people from accessing screening and to remove these barriers.

This work includes:

Communications

We communicate and share information in different ways to improve health literacy in screening. We want to enable everyone who is eligible to make an informed choice to take part in screening.

We are working to improve health literacy in screening.

What we have done

We’ve published an updated charter for CervicalCheck and BreastCheck.

We have also created:

accessible information about our 4 screening programmes
videos about our screening programmes in different languages
videos with Irish Sign Language (ISL)
factsheets about our screening programmes in different languages
a guide to screening for carers and the people they support

Programme charters

Accessible information

Videos in different languages

Videos with Irish Sign Language (ISL)

A guide to screening for carers

A guide to screening for carers and the people they support (PDF, 1.6 MB, 33 pages)

Useful resources

Contact

To find out more about our work to improve equity in screening and to get involved, email equity@screeningservice.ie

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