Health Inequalities and Addressing These Within a Cancer Information Service

Across the UK there is an emphasis on trying to address health inequality.  For a cancer information service, this includes ensuring that all people have equal access to information about cancer.

In order to find out how to improve accessibility, we first need to find out who we are currently   reaching.  Without this information it is difficult to make decisions about what changes we might need to make, in how we promote the helpline and the channels through which we offer our service.  If we know who is currently using us, we will get a sense of if there are any groups in society that are not using us.

To find this out we need to ask our callers for demographic information about themselves to paint a picture of who is using us now.  There are two ways that we can do this.  Currently, we ask all our service users what part of the country they contacted us from and their ethnic group.  But this only gives us part of the picture, what about their gender identity, sexuality, age and social class?  The challenge of asking for more information at the end of each call, is that after callers have been talking to us about deeply personal and emotional issues relating to their health and cancer experience, asking demographic question might take the call in a direction that the caller may not want to go in.  It also can substantially lengthen calls.

However, we can easily ask more demographic question in user satisfaction surveys which our callers can answer in their own time and when it is convenient for them.  Our user satisfaction surveys are sent out to a sample of users by email after the call.  In the questionnaire, along with asking about their experience of using the service we now ask further questions to help us gauge the characteristics of people who use our helpline.  These include questions about, age, the occupation of the main income earner in their household, ethnicity, religion, gender identity and sexuality.  So far, we are getting a range of responses to these questions and the majority of respondents seem happy to answer them. The results of the survey will give us a snapshot of our callers’ characteristics and help us improve accessibility in a focused and needs based way.

Martin Ledwick Cancer Research UK martin.ledwick@cancer.org.uk