The North Midlands Breast Screening Service, a program of the U.K. National Health Service that provides free breast screening services to women aged 50 to 70, has reported a spike in first-time visits to its facilities in Stoke-on-Trent, England, following an engagement campaign on Facebook.
Here are five things to know:
1. For the campaign, the members of the North Midlands Breast Screening Service posted information about breast cancer screenings in local community groups on Facebook, such as information on how the screening process works and how to schedule an appointment. Healthcare practitioners also addressed questions from potential patients through the organization's Facebook page.
2. One patient, Pam Lowe, said she saw a post in a community Facebook group promoting a visit by the organization's mobile breast screening unit. She reached out to the organization's Facebook page to inquire about the project, since the mobile unit had already left her village — and Gina Newman, a health improvement practitioner at the service, helped her schedule an appointment.
3. The Facebook campaign led to a 13 percent increase in first-time attendances for breast screening in Stoke-on-Trent since 2014, according to NHS. Pete Nuckley, service delivery manager at the charity Good Things Foundation, said the results show the engagement campaign helped to make the "whole process more human — and that's key to engaging patients in their own healthcare."
4. The Facebook campaign is one of 20 "digital inclusion" projects that the Widening Digital Participation Programme at NHS Digital — the information and technology arm of NHS — is working on with Good Things Foundation. These projects focus on connecting patients with digital tools and information to improve their health.
5. Juliet Bauer, chief digital officer at NHS England, said: "The Stoke project is an example of how digital channels can be used to communicate with patients, providing local advice and [answering] key concerns … This work is part of the NHS' wider commitment to digitally transform the way we work with all of our patients, improving the information we provide and empowering the public to take charge of their own health and care."