I’m talking about breast cancer early detection promotion in Indonesia. I just want to share the experience of the Indonesian Breast Cancer Foundation these last twenty years to other organisations so that they can learn what we were doing.

What does the Indonesian Breast Cancer Foundation do?

Since it was established twenty years ago, we concentrate on breast cancer early detection promotion and prevention and also we educate for breast cancer early detection to the society of women in Indonesia. 

We did a lot of awareness of the breast cancer early detection programme and also we give education by creating training programmes, not only for women in society in particular but also for healthcare providers and also for laywomen, of course. It is concentrating on educating early breast cancer detection.

What impact has the Indonesian Breast Cancer Foundation had?

We cannot see that much yet because we are a large country and we have about 70,000 islands. But we have been working this for the last twenty years so we’ve got a lot of programmes like the recent one, the training programme for healthcare workers using a telementoring training programme and by using an ECHO model. It was a successful programme because we were collaborating with the cancer care communities in one region and then with other stakeholders also like the district hospitals, primary health centres and also with the National Cancer Centre, that is for the speakers for the training, it really works. Also we profiled the training for promotion of how to perform breast self-examination correctly and also the clinical breast cancer examination using breast phantom. That is on the in-person approaches so that they can perform to do the correct breast self-examination practices.

We also do webinars through an online basis and hybrid also, so combined between online and also in-person approaches for those kinds of training programmes. We also have the training programme for breast cancer peer support; we do it every year, it’s internationally certificated. Also we have home care for breast cancer patients who are in the process of treatment if they live outside of Jakarta, in this case I am talking about Jakarta, they can go to the home care for radiation because they have to go to the hospital every day. So we have this home care near the hospital so they can stay there during their treatment.

Do you have any advice for other similar organisations?

With the other organisations we have to concentrate on early detection in accordance with the global breast cancer initiatives which is pillar number one. Because as a breast cancer organisation, as an NGO, we cannot go beyond the population so we concentrate on how to educate the woman to come to the breast screening programme, for instance. So it is important for other organisations also to concentrate because the breast cancer in Indonesia is the highest cancer in Indonesia. So we need to downstage the number of breast cancer late stage.