Over the past year, the Cancer Insight Panels have played a key role in supporting the Strategic Evidence team’s Inclusive Imagery project. The project started back in October 2022. Its goal was to create a bank of diverse, culturally sensitive photography that portrayed key moments in cancer screening and symptom investigation for use across our public, patient, and health professional content.
At the time, we knew that there was a lack of culturally inclusive breast screening imagery in the wider media, and that there were key gaps in the people and moments shown in our own photography. In this project, we wanted to understand and fill some of the most important gaps in our content so that we could make our photography more inclusive and accessible.
We knew it was essential for us to involve people affected by cancer from the very start. The panels could draw on their experiences to help flag what images were missing from cancer-related information and help us get the tone of the photos just right.
The Patient Insight Panels played an important role throughout the project. We spoke to members at key stages to help us:
decide what people, settings and moments we wanted to portray in the photos
understand how to do that in a sensitive, authentic and positive way
choose the final photos from the photoshoot.
Deciding exactly what to show in our photos was one of our biggest challenges. Members encouraged us to represent groups of people who were both missing in our photos and who faced healthcare barriers. This is exactly what we did.
We followed members’ advice to show family dynamics (eg between partners or parent and child), faith groups and LGBT+ relationships, and to consult with the communities we wanted to portray to ensure our photos felt authentic. Before the photoshoot, the panels also gave us useful guidance to help us make sure the scenes came across as positive and reassuring – for instance, by showing physical interactions, avoiding strong facial expressions and showing patients being active and asking questions.
Panels gave us feedback on some of the final images from the photoshoot, telling us what they liked and disliked, and why. Comments on angles, odd facial expressions or reassuring interactions were incredibly useful and helped us choose our final 64 photos from the hundreds of photos taken on the day.
The photos are now available for staff to download and use. Staff are already planning to use the photos across a range of materials, such as news and blog posts, newsletters, cancer awareness talks, and webpages for health professionals.
We’ve also shared a selection of photos with NHS Wales to use in new patient leaflets and training resources for health professionals, which will be used to help improve screening uptake.
The Strategic Evidence Team thanks all the panel member who supported this project! They’re so grateful to you for sharing your thoughts and personal experiences. They also appreciated and enjoyed working with you.
