A community of prevention and hope taking root in Malaysia

In Malaysia, data from 2017-2021 show that In Malaysia, more than 60% of cancer cases with staging information were diagnosed at Stage III or IV – a stark reality that continues to cost lives and futures.

To address this urgency, the National Cancer Society Malaysia and Asia Cancer Forum of Japan, both UICC member organisations, came together in 2022, in solidarity within the UICC community, to launch BEAUTY (Bringing Education And Understanding To You) & Health. A steadfast pillar of this endeavour has been sustainability support from Astellas Pharma Inc.

We chose to begin not in hospitals, but in the ’everyday places‘ where life is actually lived. Barbershops and beauty salons are familiar spaces found in every neighbourhood – places people visit routinely across communities, cultures, and languages. For many women, a salon is not only where one’s appearance is cared for, but also where conversations naturally unfold: about family, about work, about the future, and sometimes, quietly, about health.

That is precisely why we sought to convey the importance of prevention, early detection, and screening, not as instruction or pressure, but as respectful and human dialogue.

The reasons screening and timely consultations do not happen cannot be reduced to ’lack of awareness‘ alone. Barriers accumulate: access to care, constraints of time and cost, language and cultural boundaries, and an unspoken social atmosphere that makes cancer difficult to name aloud.

Women, in particular, often carry multiple responsibilities at home and at work, and are therefore more likely to postpone their own health. So how do we build a society in which women do not have to place their health last?

Our answer, as practitioners, is BEAUTY. BEAUTY began as an effort to bring cancer knowledge and the meaning of screening into the natural flow of everyday life. A haircut, a moment of self-care, a conversation with someone who knows you — and, gently, a door opens for health to become part of the ordinary. By creating learning spaces beyond hospital walls, we aimed to help people see cancer not as a distant subject for “someone else,” but as a matter that touches their own lives and the futures of those they love.

Listening carefully to voices from the field, NCSM and ACF have developed educational resources across four languages (English, Malay, Tamil, and Chinese) to reflect Malaysia’s diversity with dignity. Through videos and booklets, we communicate practical, understandable information on cancers such as breast, cervical, colorectal, and lung cancer, using language designed for everyday decision-making, not medical abstraction.

We have trained beauty and grooming professionals as ’agents of change’, equipping them to pass health messages onward with sensitivity and trust. We have also built pathways that do not stop at ’learning‘: QR-code access, community touchpoints, and WhatsApp-enabled engagement have helped connect awareness to the next steps: consultation, screening, and action.

One significant milestone was the public launch of the BEAUTY Library on 30 November 2023, Malaysia’s first health digital library on cancer, with 44 videos and 48 booklets..

Another is the National Cancer Screening Registry (NCSR), established as a digital foundation that can support individuals and healthcare stakeholders through data capture, self-assessment, and continuity of records. The registry is central to a vision in which prevention is not episodic, but sustained – not merely promoted, but tracked, supported, and strengthened over time.

Community momentum has also been tangible. BEAUTY & Health was designed from the outset to be implemented through community-based sessions grounded in the salon and barbershop setting, beginning in Kuala Lumpur and expanding into multiple states. Over three years, the programme has evolved from awareness-raising into a practice that can foster real behavioural change within communities.

The scale of reach alone is not what matters most, however. Behind every number is a human story: someone who spoke about cancer with their family for the first time; someone who went for screening despite fear; someone – a stylist, a barber – who offered a gentle prompt at the right moment.

Today, BEAUTY is moving into its next phase: BEAUTY Plus. While sustaining and expanding community-based interventions through salons and barbershops, BEAUTY Plus introduces a new pillar, BEAUTY@Work, designed to bring prevention and screening messages into the workplace as another sphere of daily life.

By training human resources and occupational safety and health focal points as ’health enablers’, and combining webinars, in-person sessions, ongoing messaging, and practical access routes to screening, BEAUTY Plus aims to reduce the barriers that so often translate into delayed action: “I’m too busy,” “I have no opportunity,” “I don’t know where to begin.” It seeks to ensure that cancer prevention is not left solely to individual effort, but becomes a shared social infrastructure.

We also recognise that the cancer journey does not end with diagnosis or treatment. Survivorship is a long road, which requires rebuilding strength, confidence, dignity, and connection. That is why we have begun to invest in support that helps people live forward after cancer.

One expression of this is BEAUTY WALK. For people who have experienced cancer, moving the body is not merely fitness. It can be a step toward strengthening the body for recurrence-prevention efforts, restoring confidence, and sustaining ties with society. BEAUTY WALK is an attempt to translate exercise from ’painful training‘ into ‘a habit that can be continued’, and to treat walking itself as a way of reclaiming beauty and dignity, and recovering one’s sense of self.

At the same time, it is not always easy to communicate convincingly to society at large the significant and positive impact the programme has on people’s lives. People tell us: “I felt relieved,” “I felt saved,” “our community feels stronger.” These are real outcomes, yet words alone do not always adequately convey what this means when we must explain value to supporters, companies, administrators, or stakeholders who need clarity at scale.

Under Astellas’s support, ACF and NCSM have therefore also contributed to efforts to translate social impact – to the extent possible – in monetary terms. This is not ’making numbers for the sake of numbers’, it is a serious attempt to make the wider ripple effects legible: effects that can extend beyond patients themselves to families, healthcare providers, and the community systems that support them.

We do not pretend this work is complete. Impact evaluation has limitations: differences in conditions and the boundaries of available data constrain precision. Yet we see this “visualisation in numbers” not as a final product, but as a starting point. It provides a foundation for improving data collection, refining methodology, and building models that can be extended across cancer types and regions.