By Pheena Kenny, Public Health Strategy and Development Manager, National Screening Service
We recently took part in a series of meetings as part of the EUCanScreen project to review ongoing initiatives, provide updates, and foster closer collaboration among EU partners.
We were joined by our Irish partners in the Department of Health and the Royal College of Surgeons, and by the World Health Organisation’s International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC), who are working with us on one of our assigned workstreams.
Over 150 participants from 24 EU member states and 4 non-member states attended the meetings.
The EUCanScreen project aims to support strategies and policies to assure high performance of cancer screening programmes across all EU member states focusing on access, quality and diagnostics. This is a priority action of Europe’s Beating Cancer Plan. The project seeks to enhance existing screening programmes for breast, cervical, and bowel cancer, while facilitating the implementation of new programmes for lung, prostate, and stomach cancer.
We took part in a workshop that explored the development of a Model of ASsessment of Artificial Intelligence (MAS-AI) to help assess how useful AI is in medical imaging. The MAS-AI tool could be used to support decision-makers in healthcare and as a guide for collecting data or doing research. Presenters discussed the application of the tool in diabetic retinopathy screening and breast screening.
We also contributed to a workshop which focused on improving cancer screening for people with intellectual disabilities. We shared information about our disability needs assessment research and our work to implement the recommendations of the report and improve the support we offer people with intellectual disabilities including:
- offering staff training on disability awareness, effective communication and reasonable accommodation
- providing training for our access officers
- creating a guide for carers to help them support the people they care for to access screening
- developing our information in accessible formats such as easy-to-read, plain English and visual stories using photos and videos
- producing videos with Irish Sign Language.
The meetings, which took place in Turin, Italy from 12 to 15 May 2025, marked a continuation of this four-year collaborative project, which is funded by the European Commission. The Irish team is involved in 8 of the 11 workstreams, and we’ll continue to contribute to this work, and to share our expertise and experiences with our EU partners.