Nirmala Bhoo Pathy, Professor at the University of Malaya and Adjunct Professor at Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, shared a post on LinkedIn:
“A policy document should not only describe what good care looks like. It must make clear who needs to do what, by when, and how progress will be measured.
That is precisely why I am so proud of our Family Health Development Division (BPKK) team led by Shazimah Abdul Samad, The Ministry of Health Malaysia, and the development of Malaysia’s Roadmap Towards Downstaging of Breast Cancer 2025–2035.
From the very beginning, we tried hard to make this a truly inclusive co-design process. Policymakers, public health teams, programme implementers, NGOs, advocates, data and registry experts, clinicians across disciplines and those closest to women’s lived realities all helped shape this roadmap.
And I think this shows!
One part I especially love is how patient navigation is finally recognised as a systems function, not just the invisible labour of NGOs and extraordinary individuals. Anyone who has worked in cancer knows that the hardest part is often not the surgery or the drugs alone, but helping women move through the maze of referrals, appointments, delays, paperwork, fear and life itself.
I am also deeply glad that gender-responsive workforce planning is explicitly there, particularly in screening and early detection. In so many settings, the issue is not awareness alone. It is comfort, dignity, trust, and whether the system feels safe enough to enter. Who delivers care matters.
And then there is the part that makes the policy nerd in me happiest: pages and pages of implementation matrix. Timelines, MDTs, accountable agencies, navigation, data systems, supportive care, survivorship. The ‘who’, the ‘when’, and the ‘how’. We wanted this to feel less like rhetoric and more like a real map for action.
Of course, even the best map means little without the resources, sustained investment, and political will to walk the journey. But this feels like an important start.”
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