Tower Hamlets Pilot Project
What is the Tower Hamlets project?
The Open up to Mouth Cancer team have just finished a project in Tower Hamlets, East London to raise awareness of mouth cancer among the local Bangladeshi community. We ran this project jointly with local health and community workers.
The project ran from June 2006 to the end of May 2008. We are now evaluating the project, doing follow-up work in the community and encouraging local health services and community groups to continue to fight mouth cancer.
Bangladeshis and mouth cancer risk
Cancer Research UK selected Tower Hamlets because the borough has a large Bangladeshi population.
We know that Bangladeshis are much more likely to use tobacco or betel quid than the general population. This puts them at a higher risk of mouth cancer.
What were the main campaign activities?
The campaign was based around four main elements:
- Mouth Cancer check-up Sessions with specially trained dentists using the borough’s mobile dental surgery. These sessions were run with the help of the Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust Dental Access Team.
- Distribution of Bilingual English-Bengali booklets and posters specially designed for the Bangladeshi community.
- Targeting key community networks to increase awareness of mouth cancer amongst relevant health and community workers.
- Conducting mouth cancer awareness surveys to track how knowledge of mouth cancer risks and symptoms is changing.
Knowledge about mouth cancer
Before beginning our pilot, we commissioned some research into levels of awareness of mouth cancer causes and symptoms amongst the Bangladeshi community in Tower Hamlets.
We surveyed four hundred adults who smoked or chewed tobacco or betel quid. Less than half recognised chewing tobacco as a risk and around two thirds knew that smoking can cause mouth cancer. But just 18% were aware that chewing betel quid without tobacco increases mouth cancer risk. These figures are much lower than the UK average.
We repeated the survey after the first phase of the pilot project and found significant improvements in awareness of symptoms and causes of mouth cancer. In particular we saw improvements in awareness of key symptoms of mouth cancer and awareness of betel quid without tobacco as a cause of mouth cancer.
How are we working with the local community?
Working with the local community is crucial to any targeted health promotion campaign. We developed this pilot project based on qualitative research with our target audience and in collaboration with our Tower Hamlets Advisory Group.
The group included representatives from local health services, community workers and volunteers. Our partners from Queen Mary University of London, Tower Hamlets Bangladeshi Stop Tobacco Project and Tower Hamlets Primary Care Trust have been crucial to the success of the pilot.
Campaign evaluation and plans for the future
We are currently bringing together the findings from the work in Tower Hamlets to fully evaluate the success of the campaign. Further information about the results of the pilot will be available soon.
