BPSA Public Health Campaign: The Cardiff Story
As a National Representative of the British Pharmaceutical Students’ Association (BPSA) at the Cardiff School of Pharmacy I work with fellow BPSA National Representatives here at the school to organise various events throughout the academic year. I have been very fortunate to be part of a strong, friendly and proactive team whose aim is to get more pharmacy students involved with the BPSA. We understand that not every pharmacy student is able to participate in BPSA events so we decided that one way we could get pharmacy students to be more involved was by carrying out a BPSA Public Health Campaign here in our own School of Pharmacy.
After our BPSA training day, we began brainstorming ideas about which health-related areas we wanted to base our health campaign around. We met up as a group to discuss our options and agreed to increase cancer awareness. We decided to do this by fundraising for Macmillan Cancer Support through a bake sale. We also wanted to make the campaign as interactive as possible so we created a cancer awareness quiz which consisted of multiple choice questions on various types of cancers. As soon as we obtained permission from the Head of our Pharmacy School, we began liaising with lecturers to allow us to make announcements at the start of their lectures to promote the campaign to all years and encourage students to bake.
On the day of the campaign, we were very keen on making the stall look pretty and presentable! Macmillan were also very helpful in providing decorations and balloons for free and sent the packs to us quickly through the post. We were delighted by the lavish food that the students had baked and were impressed by the generous contributions of both students and staff. The cancer-awareness quiz was also very popular and students who scored full marks were given a free cake. We even got members of staff to take part in the quiz and received feedback saying they found the quiz thought-provoking and made them more cancer aware!
Our campaign was successful as we managed to raise a whopping £133 on the day!
Not to mention it was a fun and rewarding experience. I recommend this to fellow BPSA National Representatives in other Schools of Pharmacy and look forward to hearing their stories.
