Breast Cancer and Screening Prevention Programmes: Perceptions of Women in a Multicultural Community in Southern Thailand

Background: Breast cancer is a leading cause of morbidity and mortality among women worldwide and in Thailand.

Objective: To explore perceptions of breast cancer and screening prevention programmes among a group of at-risk women in a multicultural setting in southern Thailand.

Methods: Semi-structured in-depth interviews were used for data collection with 30 at-risk group women. Women from Muslim and Buddhist backgrounds were purposively included in this study. The thematic analysis method was used to analyse the data.

Results: Four themes were identified from our data: perceptions of breast cancer, being diagnosed with breast cancer and anxiety, stigma: effects of breast cancer, and breast self-screening and prevention of breast cancer. The participants had some knowledge about the risk factors for breast cancer. However, participants perceived that breast cancer could occur to individual women at any time and that it was not possible to entirely prevent the disease, even when following a breast self-examination programme. However, most participants perceived that whether one would be afflicted by breast cancer depended also on Allah and their own karma. All participants were encouraged to attend breast self-screening training by healthcare providers of local health centres, but they had no confidence to perform self-screening soon after finishing the training programme. This became the reason for a lack of regular self-screening with responsibility left to health practitioners. Although participants were aware that breast self-screening should be their routine practice, there were multiple barriers to this, including accurate knowledge about breast cancer, belief, self-awareness, screening skills and healthcare facilities. Breast self-screening was recognised as an important means of early detection. However, most women did not perform this regularly, which could increase their risk of developing breast cancer.

Conclusions: Public health providers need to be more concerned about the perceptions, beliefs and practices regarding breast cancer and develop prevention practices that work better for women living in more diverse cultural locations so that they may be able to follow preventive practices and reduce their vulnerability to breast cancer.