By Lynn Swinburne, Equity Manager, National Screening Service
Improving equity in screening is a central focus of our work. In 2025, we saw this work grow across many communities across Ireland.
Our work is guided by our:
During 2025, we worked with communities, partners and frontline staff to make screening more equitable and accessible for everyone. Community connections and community-led action are helping us reach people who may otherwise face barriers to taking part in screening.
Building community connections
A key part of this work is our Community Champions project, which builds the capacity of community health workers to support people in their communities to take part in screening.
We piloted the project in 2024, training 40 people, and published an evaluation of the pilot project in 2025. The report showed that community champions reached people across many communities, including migrants, Roma, Travellers, disabled people, homeless people, the LGBTQI+ community, refugees, people living in deprivation and people in addiction.
In 2025, we trained 54 more community champions through two new groups – Roma Health Network; and HSE Dublin North City and County. And we worked with Cairde to train Roma peer workers.
Working with these communities helps us to understand how best to support outreach activities and deliver information about screening in ways that are culturally accurate and adapted to meet the literacy needs of the community.
We also published our Interventions Toolkit for Communities to support this work. This practical, evidence-based toolkit supports community health workers who complete our training to plan and deliver targeted interventions that improve participation in screening.
Meeting people where they are
Throughout 2025, partnerships with community organisations helped us to bring screening closer to people and address barriers to participation.
In Cork, we worked with our community champions to support Ukrainian women to access BreastCheck. Community champions helped us to identify barriers such as frequent changes of address and language barriers. We supported 39 Ukrainian women from three accommodation centres attended for breast screening through this initiative.
We also worked with the medical clinic team at the Redbarn International Protection Accommodation Service centre in Cork to support migrant women to access cervical screening. Our CervicalCheck Screening Training Unit provided training and support to the clinic’s nurse sample taker, while the migrant support worker completed our Community Champions training.
Since cervical screening began there in late 2024, half of all eligible women living at the centre have attended for screening.
Working with partners to reach underserved communities
Strategic partnerships are another important part of our work to improve equity in screening.
In 2025, we worked with Dublin Simon Community to help people experiencing homelessness access diabetic eye screening. We brought Diabetic RetinaScreen into the community by holding a screening clinic onsite in a Simon Community house so that people living with diabetes could have their eye screening and register for screening.
We also continued our partnership with Pavee Point Traveller and Roma Centre to improve knowledge and awareness of diabetic eye screening among Travellers living with diabetes. Traveller Community Health Workers were trained about diabetes and diabetic eye screening so they could share this information with Travellers in Finglas and Blanchardstown, supporting people to register and attend for screening.
Making screening information more accessible
Improving equity in screening also means making sure people have accessible information and inclusive services.
In 2025 we:
- published a Guide to screening for carers, developed in response to recommendations from our disability needs assessment and in consultation with carers’ organisations, disability advocates and our Patient and Public Partnership
- produced videos about our four screening programmes with Irish Sign Language (ISL) in partnership with the Irish Deaf Society
- continued to provide disability awareness training for staff across our screening services.
Community-led approaches are making a difference
Our work throughout 2025 shows how community-led, culturally informed approaches can help make screening services more accessible.
By working in partnership with communities, adapting information and meeting people where they are, we can help more people take part in screening and make informed choices about their health.
Community connections are making a real difference and we will continue building on this work.
Find out more about our work to improve equity in screening.