During Bowel Cancer Awareness Month, Deborah Whelan, Community Intercultural Health Worker with Buíon Phort Láirge*, talks about her role and how she helps people to choose screening.
Deborah Whelan is as part of the Buíon Roma Intercultural Health Programme, working with the Roma Community in Waterford City and County. As a Community Intercultural Health Worker, Deborah works with people in the Roma community to improve access to health services and provide information on available supports, working directly with people to help them navigate the system and supporting those who have unmet language or literacy needs.
Deborah’s work started a year and a half ago with the Roma Health Project, working with Buíon’s Atelier Roma Project to provide wrap around supports to the community. Through these projects, staff deliver men’s and women’s weekly programmes providing one-to-one and group training, education and personal development support to enhance progression to employment. The project also provides programmes, courses and advocacy clinics to support people to access services including healthcare.
Deborah says that the relationships she builds with people through the project are at the centre of her work: “People come in on Tuesday and Wednesday mornings for training and education, things like woodwork and sewing. Over time, I get to know people and build relationships with them. It takes time - over a few months, we get to know each other and that builds trust. We’re here to help with anything, and that creates the space for me to talk to people about their health and screening.”
Deborah is part of our Community Champions Programme. She says: “The opportunity came up to do the community champions training last year. Helping people to access screening fits perfectly with my job. After doing the training, I’m well informed when chatting to the community I work with and I have the knowledge and skills to help people in the Roma community to access screening.”
One of the main barriers to screening among the community Deborah works with is “a belief that if you’re not sick, you don’t need to go to a doctor or do a test. Preventive screening isn’t really inherent in the community, which is the same in lots of communities. I talk a lot about how screening is for people who don’t have symptoms. It’s positive that people don’t have a fear of finding something wrong – it’s quite the opposite. For the community I work with, there is an openness to engaging with health services and people talk about and look after their health. So, my focus is on trying to encourage prevention rather than react to something that’s already there. My job is about encouraging small changes – taking part in BowelScreen is part of that.”
Working with small groups, Deborah provides practical supports to the community, helping people to check they are registered for screening and sharing information about screening programmes in multiple languages. Deborah says: “I haven’t experienced anyone refusing screening. I talk to people when they are coming up to the eligible age for BowelScreen so that we can check they are registered and make sure they will get invited when they reach the eligible age.”
Video resources in multiple languages including Romanian, Slovak and Czech are important for Deborah’s work: “I’ll sit with a small group of people and explain what screening is about. There can be language and literacy barriers for some people, whereas others may be fluent in multiple languages. When I’m trying to explain something I can say ‘now I’m going to send you a video’ The videos break down those language and literacy barriers and people come back to me to get registered”.
*Buíon Phort Láirge is a trading name for Waterford Area Partnership CLG.