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With the publication of the first ever government-led women’s health strategy, ministers have vowed to tackle decades of ‘systemic’ and ‘entrenched’ inequality in England.
While women’s health has undergone a generational culture shift in recent years, prompting more open discourse around historically stigmatised concerns regarding our wombs, tales of dismissal by both male and female physicians remain rife.
This issue is known as the gender health gap, whereby women are taken less seriously by medical professionals, particularly in the field of female-specific illnesses like endometriosis, perimenopause, and polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS).
Continually finding it much harder than men to have our bodies understood, women have been conditioned time and time again to believe that pain and discomfort are normal, with receiving a diagnosis – let alone adequate treatment – an all but impossible feat.
It’s for this reason that the UK government’s ‘12-week call for evidence’ last March was welcomed with open arms, an opportunity for women and girls to come forward with our experiences of the nation’s healthcare systems.
Introduced to help policymakers tackle inequalities and build a new Vision for Women’s Health, the move was on the back of acknowledgment from ministers that ‘less [was] known about conditions only affecting women’ and that services for female patients needed improving.
16 months on, and the strategy (which is the first of its kind) has officially been published, bringing the nation one step closer towards closing the gender health gap once and for all.
The aim is to tackle decades of ‘systemic’ and ‘entrenched’ inequality in England by overhauling medical attitudes to women with several steps.
These include compulsory women’s health training for doctors, more cancer checks, and ‘one-stop shop’ hubs across the NHS.
Access to contraception, IVF for female same-sex couples – there will no longer be a requirement for them to pay for artificial insemination to prove their fertility status – maternity support, and mental health services will also be improved.
In addition, baby-loss certificates will be offered to parents who have lost a child before 24 weeks.
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This is in an attempt to acknowledge their difficult situation amid findings that every day around 14 babies die before, during, or soon after birth in the UK, a persistently taboo issue that is often ignored by society.
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