There Is A Can In Cancer

Awareness among students and the wider community about practical ways to prevent cancer and adopt healthy lifestyles .

Our Social Issue

The area of concern is teen awareness about the prevention of different types of cancer . We discovered that there is a huge lack of awareness with skin cancer prevention , and sunbed damage awareness . There was also limited knowledge on how to check yourself for breasts or testicals . We are growing worried about the increase in vaping . We wanted to empower young people through an awareness campaign to help them make healthier lifestyle choices .

Why We Chose It

We picked this social issue after hearing speakers from The Marie Keating Unit and Breast Cancer Ireland during our school Wellbeing Week in September . A lot of our YSI team were not aware of all of the causes of cancer and the ways that you can try to prevent it . We decided we would like to empower young people in our community by giving them information and educating them on practical ways we can lead a healthier lifestyle. We worked with health care professionals to source factual information with the goal of helping our community

Our Goal

Our big idea is to create more awareness about preventing cancer later in life and to help students recognise signs and symptoms early to prevent illness . We are passionate in particular about awareness around skin cancer as it the main cancer in Ireland and we feel that young people need more education on this topic through education at primary and secondary level . We enlisted the help of the Marie Keating Unit to create awareness and Breast Cancer Ireland and we are spreading awareness using HSE material but this needs to happen nationally to make a real change .

Our Innovative Action

We have created more awareness during our school assemblies by warning students about the dangers of vaping . We organised community talks on the topic of Breast Cancer Awareness in our local community centre and local Primary school for all the staff there , we also organised this talk for our TY student body . We organised a talk with a testicular cancer survivor for all TY boys . Our plan for April and May is to roll out a Skin Cancer Awareness Campaign in our school and create much needed education on this topic from reliable sources using HSE reources

Our Impact

We have created more awareness locally in our community about the signs and symptoms of breast cancer , we hope that this will encourage more women to check themselves regularly. We hope that all our TY boys will talk to their brothers , fathers, guardians about the importance of checking themselves regularly and not to ignore any changes that people might notice as early detection is key in all cancers as we know from our research. We hope that in April /May we will create much more awareness about protecting our skin through our workshops in school and locally