PinkOctober

Hi @PeterB and @Traveltext

I have followed up with our media team regarding your questions about Male Breast Cancer day and what we have been doing for men in general (in regards to your discussion Peter) and they advised the following: 

BCNA has been working to be more inclusive of men since 2014, when the booklet Men Get Breast Cancer Too was produced.

BCNA messaging has also been altered to include ‘all Australians with breast cancer’ and whenever statistics are used the number of men diagnosed each year is also stated. In planting a mini field of pink silhouettes men are always represented with blue silhouettes. 

You may have noticed that in the replica of the first planting outside Federal Parliament on 17th October this year to mark 20 years since the start of BCNA that blue silhouettes were also present to represent the number of men diagnosed in proportion to that of the women. 

The Field Of Women event on the MCG also offered blue ponchos for those wanting to represent men.

Our State of the Nation report that was presented to Federal Parliament in June of this year highlighted the difficulties experiences by specific demographic groups including men. 

IN 2017 BCNA launched Australia’s first Male Breast Cancer Awareness Day to help educate the public and in 2018 that day was also recognised. In the lead up to media planning for October 2018 several story ideas on Male Breast Cancer were pitched to publications- It  was our understanding that a feature article was going to be published on a man with breast cancer – it had been months in the planning and was a piece to be written by a journalist whose father was diagnosed this year. For reasons we are not aware it didn’t go ahead. We had planned to share the article on our website and social channels but in its absence BCNA used an alternate post  and received good reach and engagement.

We also put forward a BCNA male member for a local article in QLD and another Facebook post was written on another male member for Men’s Magazine