By Caroline Walsh, Public Health Officer, National Screening Service
We've published a 2-year action plan to support our work to improve equity in our screening programmes. Our goal is to continuously improve our approach to make screening more equitable, and this action plan shows our commitment to this.
The action plan is guided by our Equity Strategic Framework 2023-2027 and focuses on addressing our 5 priority areas:
- Research and data: we will continue to apply an evidence-based approach to our work improving equity in screening - conducting research, gathering feedback, identifying opportunities for capturing equity-related data and reviewing our work.
- Education and training: we will enhance the education, learning and development needs of our staff, screening providers and other stakeholders by raising awareness of existing information resources, developing new resources and identifying new opportunities for shared learning.
- Partnerships: we will continue to strengthen our existing partnerships, and develop new ones, to improve health equity and enhance participation in screening.
- Access and inclusivity: we will continue our work to better understand the barriers and enablers to screening from a participant’s perspective and act to address them.
- Communication: we will continue to address barriers to screening by understanding and responding to the communication needs of different audiences, adapting and tailoring our messages, and developing different formats of communication to make our information more accessible, and to increase health literacy.
How we’ll get it done
Our Equity Oversight Committee, made up of our staff and patient representatives, will lead on the implementation of our action plan. We’ll monitor our progress and report on it.
Next steps
By 2026, we’ll publish a progress report on how we’ve worked to improve access to screening for marginalised and underserved groups. We will then publish a new 2-year action plan. By 2028, we’ll evaluate our equity framework and action plans to see how much of an impact our work has had on improving equity in screening and we’ll share our learnings.
Keep up to date about our work to improve equity in screening at hse.ie/equityinscreening