LLANELLI: Asda’s trolleys have gone pink, because four in ten people in Wales have never checked their chest

Shoppers at Asda in Llanelli will find pink trolleys in the bays this month, and they are there to ask one question: have you checked your chest?

The Llanelli store is one of two in Wales, with Wrexham, picked for the supermarket’s Tickled Pink campaign for Breast Cancer Awareness Month, which starts today.

Asda says it chose the stores from its own customer survey, which found 38% of people in Wales have never checked their chests or have no routine for doing it. That puts Wales second only to the West Midlands in what the company calls its “checking deserts”.

Each pink trolley carries a poster with the signs to look for and a QR code on the handle. Scan it and you get checking guidance from Breast Cancer Now and CoppaFeel!, and a pledge to check regularly that takes a few seconds to sign.

What the survey found

The figures come from Asda’s Great British Check-In report, a survey of 1,492 of its customers across the UK carried out in August. One in three said they had never checked.

The reasons were familiar ones: 17% forget, 11% are not in the habit, 8% don’t know what to look for, and 7% didn’t know they should be checking at all.

A quarter said they were not confident they would notice a change, and 15% were not sure what they would do if they found one. Most, 77%, said they would see a GP.

Figures quoted by the campaign put the scale of it plainly: one in seven women in the UK will be diagnosed with breast cancer in their lifetime, and around 55,500 women and 400 men are expected to be diagnosed this year.

Survival has gone from 70% to nearly 90%

In the 1990s, 70% of women survived breast cancer for five years or more. The figure is now nearly 90%, which the charities put down to research and earlier detection. That is the whole case for checking: the sooner it is found, the better treatment tends to work.

Last year Diane Thomas from Carmarthen, who found a lump while caring for her mother and did not see a doctor for four years, spoke about her terminal diagnosis to urge families to talk about what they want at the end of life.

Carrie Green of Breast Cancer Now said a third of people never having checked showed “more vital awareness work is needed”. “The sooner breast cancer is found, the more likely treatment is to be successful, meaning chest checking can save lives,” she said.

Natalie Haskell, chief executive of CoppaFeel!, said the trolleys took “a vital reminder directly into communities where people are least likely to be checking”.

30 years and £100m

Tickled Pink is 30 this year. Asda says it has raised more than £100m for Breast Cancer Now and CoppaFeel! in that time, and it wants a million more people pledging to check this autumn. Emma Betts, its charity partnerships manager, said the trolleys were about “putting breast cancer awareness on everyone’s list”.

The 500 trolleys are going into ten stores: Llanelli and Wrexham in Wales, and stores in London, the Midlands, Yorkshire and Scotland. Tickled Pink products with checking messages are in every store this month, and the same message is going on till receipts.

If you notice a change, your GP is the first call. Breast Cancer Now’s free helpline is 0808 800 6000. Pink trolley or not, the checking takes a minute.

Author

Kit Peters

Kit Peters is a journalist and the editor of Swansea Bay News, covering Swansea, Neath Port Talbot and Carmarthenshire since 2020.