Bowel Cancer Awareness Month 2026

The Scottish Bowel Screening Programme invites people living in Scotland aged 50 to 74 to complete the bowel screening test every two years. The test aims to pick up early signs of bowel cancer, before people have any symptoms. It can help spot cancer at an early stage, when treatment is more likely to be successful. The test is sent to people at home where it can be completed in private and returned using the pre-paid envelope provided.

To help raise awareness and encourage those who are eligible to complete their kit, PHS has created a social media toolkit with static/video assets and captions to share on your social media channels. All resources can be downloaded on the PHS Marketing Resource Centre.

In addition, two step-by-step videos were developed to support Scotland's national bowel screening programme:

• Bowel screening - how to complete your home test
• Bowel screening - what you need to know about your colonoscopy appointment

There’s also an additional video with a clinician answering the most commonly asked questions before a colonoscopy answered.

The videos are available in other languages (Arabic, BSL, Dari, Pashto, Polish, Simplified Chinese and Ukrainian) to help address barriers and reduce inequalities.

There has been an increase in the number of unlabelled kits being returned to the national bowel screening centre. We encourage you to promote the ‘Label your kit’ asset to spread the message of correctly labelling the kit before posting.

Throughout Bowel Cancer Awareness Month, you can also follow and share content from @BowelCancerUK. There is more information including case studies available at www.getcheckedearly.org/real-stories.

Please regularly feed the social media assets into your planned activity using the hashtag #BowelScreeningScotland. In April, you can also use #BowelCancerAwarenessMonth. Using the hashtags allows us to monitor usage, which informs future campaigns.

Your support is much appreciated.