The HSE’s National Cancer Control Programme (NCCP) and Healthy Ireland have unveiled a new SunSmart School Accreditation toolkit aimed at promoting sun protection in primary and post-primary schools across Ireland.
The comprehensive toolkit provides essential information and resources for students, teachers, parents and guardians on achieving SunSmart accreditation, while offering valuable learning opportunities about sun protection.
This initiative comes in response to alarming statistics revealing skin cancer as Ireland’s most common cancer, with over 11,000 new cases diagnosed annually. Health officials emphasise that most skin cancers are preventable through proper protection from ultraviolet (UV) radiation from both the sun and artificial sources such as sunbeds.
Children and young people are particularly vulnerable to UV damage, which accumulates over a lifetime. The toolkit addresses this concern by targeting educational settings where young people spend significant portions of their day, often during peak UV hours between 11am and 3pm.
Castleisland Community College has been recognised as the first SunSmart accredited school following a successful pilot programme. The college’s Transition Year students won the Young Social Innovators 2024 award for their skin cancer awareness project called ‘Sun Smarties’. They designed a four-step process that serves as a model for other schools seeking SunSmart accreditation.
Shirley O’Shea, the Senior Health Promotion and Improvement Officer for Cancer Prevention for the South West, praised the students’ work: “Castleisland Community College’s project was innovative and has helped to provide other schools with a model to educate students about being ‘SunSmart,’ which can help reduce their risk of developing skin cancer later in life. Children and adolescents spend half of their childhood at school and about eight hours per week travelling to and from school, on lunch breaks, and participating in outdoor school-based activities. Much of this time falls between the hours of 11am and 3pm when the sun’s UV rays are at their strongest”.
The SunSmart initiative promotes the “5 S’s” approach to sun protection:
- Slip on clothing to cover exposed skin
- Slop on broad-spectrum sunscreen (SPF 30+ for adults, 50+ for children)
- Slap on a wide-brimmed hat
- Seek shade during peak UV hours (11am-3pm)
- Slide on UV-protective sunglasses
Dr Breeda Neville, Specialist in Public Health Medicine at the HSE’s NCCP, highlighted the long-term risks of childhood sun exposure: “Sunburn during childhood and adolescence increases the risk of getting skin cancer as an adult. If a child or young person is badly sunburned more than 3 times before the age of 20, they more than double their risk of developing melanoma (the most serious form of skin cancer) as an adult. Primary and post-primary schools can play a key role in educating students about UV radiation exposure, the importance of sun protection and the dangers of using sunbeds”.
Schools interested in implementing the SunSmart programme can order the toolkit by visiting www.healthpromotion.ie/products and selecting ‘cancer’ from the drop-down menu. For additional information, schools can email [email protected] or visit www.hse.ie/skincancerprevention.