Mitha Eka & Linda Bennett - Patient Education for Cancer

Any cancer diagnosis will leave the patient with lots of questions. What is this disease, and why has it happened to me? What are my chances, what are my options, and what will it mean for me and my family? For Indonesian women diagnosed with cervical cancer, the answers have not always been easy to come by. Until recently, no formal patient education materials were being provided at the point of diagnosis — and where good information is scarce, myths fill the gap, the biggest one being that a diagnosis is simply a death sentence.

In this episode, we look at what happened when a team of Australian and Indonesian researchers set out to change that. Dr Mitha Eka and Professor Linda Rae Bennett, with colleagues at the Centre for Reproductive Health at Universitas Gadjah Mada, spent a year co-designing the first patient education materials of their kind in Indonesia. Funded by the Australia-Indonesia Institute, the project brought together survivors, clinicians, four hospitals in Yogyakarta, community organisations, and government at both provincial and national levels.

With our guests, host Dr Elisabeth Kramer discusses what it takes to build something like this inside a health system where clinicians may see a hundred patients a day, why the team developed a new “collaborative equilibrium” approach rather than importing international guidelines, and how questions of culture, hierarchy and collective family decision-making shaped every stage of the work. They also share what came out of it: a diagnostic flipchart for clinicians, take-home fact sheets for patients and families, and a word bank to help clinicians explain complex medical information in everyday spoken Indonesian.

About the guests

Dr Mitha Eka is an educational specialist and early career researcher who works across the University of Melbourne and Federation University. She has more than a decade of experience designing, delivering and evaluating educational programs spanning global health, social innovation and plant biosecurity, in both Australia and Indonesia.

Professor Linda Rae Bennett is a medical anthropologist based at the Nossal Institute for Global Health at the University of Melbourne. She has thirty years of experience in research and health capacity building in Indonesia, and for the past decade has collaborated with the Centre for Reproductive Health at Universitas Gadjah Mada on a range of projects related to HPV and cervical cancer.

Find out more

The project is the Australia-Indonesia Collaboration for Cervical Cancer Patient Education (AI-KPPKS / Australia Indonesia Kolaborasi untuk Pendidikan Pasien Kanker Serviks), funded by the Australia-Indonesia Institute. Full details are available on the Nossal Institute for Global Health project page:

Collaborative curriculum development for cervical cancer patient education in Indonesia

https://mspgh.unimelb.edu.au/research-groups/nossal-institute-for-global-health/Prevention-and-Management-of-Health-Conditions/collaborative-curriculum-development-for-cervical-cancer-patient-education-in-indonesia