Barbershop blood pressure checks find one in four men with undiagnosed hypertension

Delroy Campbell has been cutting hair in Handsworth for 26 years and reckons he knows most of his customers’ secrets. Until last October he did not know that nearly a third of them had dangerously high blood pressure. “You sit a man in that chair and he’ll tell you about his divorce, his mortgage, his kids,” he said. “Ask him when he last saw a doctor and he goes quiet.”

Campbell’s shop is one of 18 barbershops across Birmingham that have spent the past year offering free blood pressure checks to customers as part of a scheme run by a city public health partnership. Results published on Saturday show that of 3,700 men screened, 27% had readings in the hypertensive range and had no prior diagnosis. More than 900 have since been referred to a GP; around 400 are now on medication.

“These are men who, by and large, do not go to the doctor,” said Dr Samuel Okafor, a GP and the scheme’s clinical lead. “They are working age, they feel fine, and they regard a surgery as a place you go when something is already wrong. High blood pressure doesn’t feel like anything until it does, and when it does it’s often a stroke. The barber’s chair is one of the few places you can reliably find them sitting still for 20 minutes.”

The scheme is modelled on programmes in the US, where barbershop-based health interventions in Black communities have shown strong results, but is the first in Britain to run at this scale. Barbers were given a half-day of training in using an automated cuff, interpreting the result against a simple traffic-light chart and having what Okafor calls “the conversation”: a non-alarming explanation of what the number means and how to book an appointment. Each shop has a direct referral line to a cluster of local practices, so men can be seen within a fortnight.

Men of Black African and Caribbean heritage in England are roughly twice as likely as white men to develop hypertension and are more likely to do so earlier in life, yet are under-represented in routine health checks. The participating shops were chosen to cover Handsworth, Lozells, Aston and Sparkbrook, where the partnership’s data showed the gap was widest.

Among those referred was Winston Grant, 52, a delivery driver who had his blood pressure taken while waiting for a skin fade in March. “The reading was 178 over something. Delroy didn’t make a fuss, he just said, mate, you want to get that looked at,” he said. “I’m on tablets now. My GP said if I’d left it another couple of years I’d have been looking at real trouble. I only went in for a haircut.”

The partnership says the scheme has cost £140,000 and estimates, using standard health economic models, that it has already prevented around a dozen strokes or heart attacks. It is seeking funding to expand to 50 shops and to pilot a similar approach in Afro-Caribbean hair salons for women. “The model is simple,” Okafor said. “Go where people already are. Trust the people they already trust.”