Hello my name is Gina and I am a Health Improvement Practitioner for the North Midlands Breast Screening Service.
My pledge was to engage well with all our service users, especially the hard to reach cohort groups, who are least likely to attend for their Breast screening invitations.
I looked at new ways that I could engage well and I then performed a number of targeted initiatives. The first initiative was to work in collaboration with the Macmillan Staffordshire LGBT team to highlight and raise the awareness of the Lesbian and Bisexual women’s health week. Research shows that there a number of barriers stopping these ladies from attending for screening. These barriers range from staff attitudes through to negative experiences and this was something I wanted to work on and improve. The initiative was held over a week with various locations being visited. This was also widely publicised over our social media accounts.
The second initiative was to engage with female prisoners. During a general wellbeing health day, I noted that there was a high level of anxiety amongst the prisoner’s especially with breast cancer and this was something that I wanted to address. I performed this by facilitating educational training sessions for the Health care staff and prisoners, who are health champions. The events were very well received, and feedback from the prisoners was that it made them feel empowered to be breast aware and they had a good understanding of why screening is important. Following on from this feedback, I will deliver these sessions annually.
I also wanted to look at how we communicate as whole to our local communities and at what health literacy levels this was being performed at. I noted during my clinical work that there is a quite a lot of anxiety with the first time ladies who are invited for screening and research shows this can stop ladies from attending for appointments. So working in collaboration with Marc Schmid, from Redmoor Health, we put our heads together to produce an animation of the screening process.
I was extremely keen for it to feature ladies from different ethnicities and for it to be pitched at just the right level. I have to say Marc and his team did a fantastic job.
This is now being shown on our Facebook page and will also be shown on GP TV’s in our local area. Thank you for reading this https://vimeo.com/digitalhealthsot/breastcancerscreening