By Marianna Prontera, Roma Programme Lead, Cairde
In 2025, we partnered with the HSE National Screening Service (NSS) to address health needs of the Roma community in Ireland. Working with the NSS and our Roma Peer Support Workers, we helped to break down barriers and improve equity in screening among the Roma community by improving awareness and access.
About Cairde
Cairde is a community development organisation working to tackle health inequities among minority ethnic communities by improving their access to health services and their participation in health planning and delivery.
Since 2010, Cairde has been providing information and advocacy to an increasing number of Roma families and individuals in Dublin, Balbriggan and nationally.
Roma Programme at Cairde
Cairde’s Roma Programme consists of mainly two projects:
- National Roma Infoline: funded by the HSE, the Infoline has received more than 13,000 calls from Roma and service providers around the country since it started in March 2020. The Infoline’s Roma Operators answer calls in Romani, Romanian and English, and provide advocacy and support to Roma callers.
- Roma Adult Education and Training Programme: funded by the Department of Children, Disability and Equality, this programme has provided training to Roma Peer Support Workers to deliver culturally sensitive health information, among other activities, and act as promoters of wellbeing within the wider Roma community.
Roma Peer Support group
Five Roma women work part-time with Cairde as Roma Peer Support Workers. In the health component of the programme, they focus on learning and sharing health promotion information within the Roma community about:
- national screening programmes
- women’s health and early child nutrition
- mental health.
Why we did the project
This project aimed to increase awareness of and access to screening programmes in the Roma community, to support equity in screening.
The Roma community face many barriers in accessing health services, including stigma and discrimination, which can lead to poorer health outcomes. Many Roma people arriving to Ireland do not speak English and are not familiar with the health services or how to access them, including screening programmes. Many people in the Roma community are young, and there is a high incidence of diabetes, making screening for diabetic retinopathy particularly relevant.
What we did
We worked with Kathryn Meade, Senior Health Promotion Officer with the NSS, to provide tailored training sessions to the Roma Peer Support group. Kathryn worked closely with Oonagh Anderson in our Roma programme, who also completed the Community Champions training with the NSS in early 2025.
The aim of the tailored training sessions was to increase the group’s knowledge about screening and their confidence in delivering messages into the Roma community. All sessions were delivered online to make it easier for people to take part around family commitments.
Kathryn facilitated sessions on the 4 national screening programmes run by the NSS – BowelScreen, BreastCheck, CervicalCheck and Diabetic RetinaScreen. The session on diabetic eye screening was co-facilitated by Dr Recie Davern, Consultant Diabetologist in Integrated Care; and the one on cervical screening by Dr Sarah Fitzgibbon, who is the Primary Care Clinical Advisor with the NSS.
The NSS provided us with resources to share in the community, including videos about screening in Romanian and posters. This helped with outreach sessions in the Roma community.
Outreach
The Roma Peer Support group conducted outreach sessions from July to November 2025. They used the NSS videos in Romanian to increase knowledge about screening. They also sent the videos by WhatsApp asking people in the Roma community to contact them if they wanted more information.
The impact of outreach
The Roma Peer Support group played a key role in promoting screening messages and breaking down barriers to accessing screening.
They supported people to:
- understand screening
- register for screening
- update their address details on the screening register
- translate appointment letters
- locate and contact GPs in their area
- attend their screening appointments.
What the group learned
- Language was the biggest barrier to accessing screening, as well as not knowing about screening.
- Fear of finding something wrong, not having a regular GP, and not knowing how to fill out forms were other barriers noted by the Peer Support group.
- Many people in the Roma community are young and are not in the age range for BowelScreen or BreastCheck.
- Learning about the symptoms of breast cancer during the training sessions, along with having a video to share with the Roma community on how to check your breasts, was very important. As many of the women the Roma Peer Support group met were not yet eligible for BreastCheck, the self-check video was shared widely among them.
- For Roma people without a stable address, registering for screening programmes can be difficult, as this usually requires an address.
- Some Roma women shared that they were hesitant to take part in cervical screening if the sample taker was not female.
- The Roma women were interested in understanding more about diabetes and the Diabetic RetinaScreen programme.
Partnership with the NSS
This collaboration with the NSS has proven to be effective. The Roma Peer Support group has helped Roma people to register and attend for screening who might otherwise not have attended.
We would like to thank the NSS for their valuable contribution towards achieving equity in the health system in Ireland. We are proud of Cairde’s Roma Peer Support group for their work in improving their community’s knowledge of and access to screening.