By Mary Sheedy, Deputy Programme Manager, BowelScreen
We recently attended an international workshop to discuss experiences, challenges and best practices in piloting and implementing bowel cancer screening programmes across Europe.
The meeting was part of the European Joint Action on Cancer Screening (EUCanScreen) project. It brought together experts from European countries with established bowel screening programmes to share their experiences and challenges with countries planning to develop them.
The programme included an overview of the European context with experts from several countries sharing lessons learned from their bowel cancer screening programmes.
We took part in a ‘World Café’ style discussion on common challenges and issues such as:
- capturing and using data
- barriers to participation
- measures to increase participation rates
- improving equity in screening
- improving communications.
We shared information about how BowelScreen works operationally in Ireland, including our quality assurance standards, what we measure and how we measure it, the BowelScreen register and data collected, and challenges in endoscopy capacity.
Our EU partners were keen to learn more about what we do to increase uptake of bowel screening, our communications and information materials, and our work to improve equity in screening.
We shared information about:
- our communications strategies to encourage people to take part in screening, for example sharing the right information at the right time; the importance of being culturally appropriate; personal storytelling and how these stories can resonate with our target audience; and using different mediums of communication such as radio and social media advertising
- what we do to increase health literacy and make our information more accessible such as providing information in different formats including easy-to-read, plain English and photo stories, and videos in multiple languages and with Irish Sign Language
- our equity framework and action plan, and our equity projects including our Community Champions project which aims to address the barriers to screening and make screening more accessible to everyone.
The meeting took place in Vienna, Austria on 31 March and 1 April 2025, and was hosted by the Austrian Team of Gesundheit Österreich GmbH (GÖG).