February 2019 - Month in Review

Another month another blog post (Woop!)

With February wrapping up, we’ll go over what we’ve been up to this month. As per usual it’s a plethora of fun-filled activities, serious work and everything in between.

Firstly, the news; a study was released which shows an association of certain foods with a decreased risk of bowel cancer. These foods in questions include onions, leeks and garlic which belong to the group called allium vegetables. The study had shown that participants who consumed the highest amount of these vegetables had the lowest risk of bowel cancer. It is important to note however, that this is only one study which took place in China. It would be far too easy, and unfair, to take view this study with our tabloid-specs on, but in reality we should wait for more research to validate this before we all decide to go on a strict allium vegetable diet.

Allium vegetables have a number of health benefits

The Health Promotion team this month have been uber-busy (this is more busy than ‘super-busy’ I’m told) with our work at a variety of conferences and community centres.

We attended the Lohri festival at Ramgarhia Sabha in Southall. They’re a tight-knit Punjabi community that have decided to raise money for bowel cancer over the spring. This month we’ve also given talks at the Harrow Afro-Caribbean Association, Yeading library and Age UK’s Ageing Well Groups to reiterate the risks and symptoms of bowel cancer as well as the plethora of benefits taking part in the screening programme entails.

We were also present at the GPN (general practice nurse) and HCSW (healthcare support worker) conference in London this month. Here we were able to promote our health promotion, speaking to healthcare professionals about the different methods, strategies, and theoretical methods we use to reach out to people regarding bowel cancer screening.

And on top of that, we attended CRUK Early Diagnosis conference this Month, where, with UCL, we were runner up for Best Scientific Poster (can’t win them all, eh?).

Lastly, the Health Promotion team also had the opportunity to speak to the tens of thousands of twitter followers of the @NHS twitter page. You can catch us giving the low-down on why screening matters and the new FIT kit.

That’s all folks! We’ll meet again in the March!