Hi everyone,

Our names are Roisin and Jovana, two transition year girls from ArdScoil Na Mara in Tramore. We are both aged 14 and are in 2nd year. We have qualified for this year’s BT Young Scientist Exhibition with our project called “Cervical Check and the HPV Vaccine- Information, Opinion and Fake News”. This is Roisin’s 2nd year qualifying as she also qualified last year with a project on the sexist conditioning of children through TV and Film.

We are writing to ask help from you. We have already met Vicky Phelan and Carol Murray (one of the 221 women affected by the Cervical Check Controversy) and they are helping us. We have also attended a Cervical Cancer briefing in Leinster House and a number of politicians and medical professionals we met there have also agreed to help us.

The central part of our project is a broad Online Survey which examines the awareness people have of Cervical Cancer, the HPV vaccine and the Cervical Check controversy. It looks at who they trust for information in relation to their health and examines their attitudes and opinions to everything around Cervical Cancer in light of the controversy. Because it is such a broad survey, we expect to generate some really useful information which we hope can be used to help guide health policy in the future.

 

Our online survey will be live for a week, until Monday December 10th. We will then gather the information and get it ready to present at the BT Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition in the RDS in January.

 

We would greatly appreciate if you could help us to spread the word by sharing our survey through your social media. We would especially like to get replies from other teenagers which is why we thought of The Shona Project.

 

You can take the survey and hear more about our work HERE.

Thanks everyone for taking the time.

Roisin and Jovana. x

Best of luck with this girls! A worthy project. From all at Shona.

Also, if you want further information, after you take the survey, please refer to the chat we had with Shona Doc-on-call, Sharon O’Donnell last year HERE.