An innovative project piloted at Operose Health's Goodman's Fields Health Centre was showcased to NHS England leaders after helping to improve cancer screening uptake in underserved communities across Tower Hamlets.
Operose Health, a leading primary care provider, runs the centre in East London which serves more than 30,000 patients.
Led by Dr Toby Lambeth and GP registrar colleagues across the area, the work is helping tackle health inequalities through locally designed, community-led approaches aimed at encouraging more people from communities with historically lower screening uptake to come forward.
The project collated data on GP attendance and highlighted a significant connection, finding that patients from under-screened groups were not disengaged with healthcare, but were in fact more likely to be regularly attending their GP surgery.
The 'Screening on Screens' initiative, developed with the North East London Cancer Alliance, introduced digital multilingual cancer screening information in GP waiting rooms alongside targeted patient communications, helping to improve awareness and accessibility for local communities, with an initial focus on Bengali-speaking populations.
Notably, across participating GP practices, bowel cancer screening uptake increased by up to 3% within just four months.
In addition the Goodman's Fields team continued more targeted work with screening non-responders, including dedicated calls from Healthcare Assistants to support patients to re-engage with the screening programme. As a result of this work, the practice's bowel cancer screening rate has increased by 8% over the past 12 months.
Following these improvements, senior leaders from NHS England's Vaccination and Screening Teams - Michelle Kane, NHS England Director of Vaccination and Screening, and Dr Harrison Carter, NHS England Director of Screening - visited the centre to learn more about the initiative and discuss how similar approaches could support communities in other parts of the country.
Building on their screening success, the East London centre expanded the 'opportunistic engagement' approach into wider vaccination and prevention work, including Human Papillomavirus (HPV) catch-up and measles vaccination campaigns.
The HPV-focused 'One More Thing' campaign, which encourages young patients in the practice to consider one more thing before leaving their appointment and get protected against HPV, saw average monthly vaccinations quadruple within six months. Meanwhile, a measles campaign using targeted messages and easier access to nurse appointments led to a 163% increase in monthly MMR (measles, mumps and rubella) vaccinations in early 2026.
Dr Toby Lambeth, GP and Health Inequalities Lead for Tower Hamlets and Hackney at Operose Health, said:
''This work began as a collaboration between GP registrars locally who wanted to explore new ways of improving screening uptake within our communities.''
''It has been particularly encouraging to see how simple, community-focused efforts can make a real difference when they are designed around the needs of our local patients.''
''We were really proud to showcase this to NHS England leaders - including the team effort behind it, particularly the work of colleagues across practices who helped develop and deliver these fantastic improvements.
''Operose Health's commitment to tackling health inequalities allows work like this to develop and scale, and with health inequalities champions in every site we are always learning from each other to improve health outcomes for everyone in our communities."