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Women’s Health and the Historical Bias

Women's Health and the Historical Bias - Exploring the historical bias against women in the healthcare system
Eluned Morgan Desk

Baroness Eluned Morgan MS

Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care

Exploring the historical bias against women in the healthcare system.

Women and girls make up just over 50 per cent of the population in Wales, but that isn’t indicated when you look at the historical levels of investment and research into women’s health.

Unfortunately, we still hear stories today of women’s voices and concerns about certain conditions being dismissed by medical professionals.

And we know far too little about many conditions that affect women and girls every day, often with debilitating effects.

There has been a historical bias against research into health conditions that only affect women, compared to those that only affect men. And also, into conditions that affect both, for example, more women die of heart disease than men, but we don’t know why. I wonder if that was the other way around, would we know the answer by now?

Since I being appointed Health Minister in the Welsh Government, I have been determined to change this and ensure women and girls get the health care services they need.

Greater Prominence to Women’s Health in Wales

In the last five years, we have established the Women’s Health Implementation Group, which has been looking at issues like pelvic health, use of mesh, endometriosis, and faecal incontinence.

Because of this group, we now have pelvic health co-ordinators and dedicated endometriosis nurses in every health board in Wales – who have been driving improvements in these historically overlooked and underfunded areas.

We have introduced training for NHS on women’s health issues, and the mandatory inclusion of Menstrual Wellbeing Education in the School Curriculum for Wales

We have published a Quality Statement for Women’s Health that sets out what is expected of the NHS in Wales in relation to women’s health. This will lead to the publication of a comprehensive Women’s Health Plan for Wales.

And on International Women’s Day this year, I was very pleased to announce the appointment of Dr Helen Munro, Consultant in Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare, as the first-ever Clinical Lead for Women’s Health in NHS Wales.

Together with the new Strategic Network Manager, she will lead the National Clinical Strategic Network for Women’s Health in developing the Women’s Health Plan for Wales.

I am also determined to see an increase in research funding for women’s health issues.

In the announcement I made on International Women’s Day, I was delighted to confirm a shift in resources to women’s health research. A women’s health research prioritization exercise will start in April, following a process that seeks the views of those with lived experience and health and social care professionals on the issues that matter most to them. Building on this exercise, a commissioned call for research focused entirely on women’s health priorities will be launched in April 2025. 

Developing a Women’s Health Plan for Wales

The development of the Women’s Health Plan for Wales will be underpinned by the December 2022 Discovery Report, based on the results of a wide-ranging survey of the issues.

The survey attracted almost 4,000 individual responses from women and girls aged 16 to 85 and above. More detailed responses, providing incredibly rich detail on the issues and concerns affecting women and their health in Wales, were provided by over 2,000 women and girls. In addition, two focus groups were held with women from diverse backgrounds and older women to gain further insight from groups that were underrepresented in the survey.

The survey found that inequalities in health outcomes exist between both men and women and between different groups of women in Wales.

On average, women in Wales live to 82.1 years of age, whereas men live to 78.3 years of age. Although women live longer, we now understand that women live a lower proportion of their lives in good health than men.

Termed ‘Healthy Life Expectancy’, women in Wales can expect to live a healthy life until, on average, 62.4 years of age, with the following 20 years spent in ill health. In contrast, men average 16.8 years in ill health. This inequality is further increased when we consider deprivation.

51 per cent of women have reported long-standing illnesses, and 40 per cent of women report feeling limited by these illnesses. In contrast, only 45 per cent of men report long-standing illness, and only 30 per cent report feeling limited by this. The most common type of illness reported by women was musculoskeletal complaints (reported by 20 per cent), mental health disorders (13 per cent), and heart and circulatory complaints (12 per cent).

The report highlights the disparities in the access to and experience of healthcare. These are partially believed to be the result of unconscious bias against women. Women face unconscious biases and disadvantages at every stage of their heart disease journey. Research funded by the British Heart Foundation suggests that the deaths of at least 8,243 women could have been prevented through equitable cardiac treatment over a ten-year period in England and Wales.

As well as heart disease, work is needed to reduce health inequalities when screening for cancers and treating other major health conditions. 

And most disheartening, it is clear from our survey that women are not always being listened to or heard by their healthcare practitioners. This must change.

This report is just the beginning and I now expect the new Women’s Health Network to bring together more women’s voices from the NHS and beyond to deliver a plan worthy of the name.

I am pleased women’s health is beginning to get the focus it needs, but we have a long way to go to create a healthcare system that women and girls can access in a timely way, is responsive to their choices and needs, and is supported by research and development that reflects their lived experiences.

This is just one of the articles that features in the ‘Healthcare and Life Sciences’ section in the new edition of our Journal. To get access to our online version please click here to subscribe. Or to buy a print version please click here.

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