World Health Day 2021 - Healthcare In a Woman’s World
World Health Day is celebrated annually on 7th April and each year a specific health theme is chosen to be highlighted. This year the World Health Organisation (WHO) are launching a campaign to ‘build a fairer, healthier’ world. They’re raising awareness for a variety of disparities, including gender inequality in healthcare.
It’s hard to believe there’s still a gender gap in healthcare yet it’s even documented by the UK Government: “there are differences in health outcomes between males and females, for different age groups and different countries.” Why are we still facing discrimination just for being women? Why are we still being judged because of the colour of our skin and where we’re from?
Benita Barden shared her experience of gender and racial inequality within the NHS when trying to get a diagnosis:
“As a black woman, I face a lose-lose situation. If I was theatrical and dramatised my pain in a bid to get medical attention, it would not increase my likelihood to treatment. I was likely to be shooed and my pain was to be postponed until I met the correct standards of severity. But then if I was stern and inquisitive about my doctors’ advice, I could be rendered the difficult, uncooperative black girl with an attitude.”
- Media Diversified
It would be nice to think that there’s been substantial progress since we’re in 2021, but there’s still a long way to go. Clinical trials are a huge problem because unsurprisingly, they’re primarily made up of men! Considering we women have different organs and present illnesses differently to men, it’s a huge flaw in the system.
Women actually end up developing more side effects because we’re taking a dose completely designed for men. In fact, a study found that in more than 90 percent of cases, women developed adverse drug reactions at nearly twice the rate of men! We need to be more involved in trials and research so that medical professionals know the correct amount of medication to give us.
Females make up the majority of chronic pain cases, yet we’re still not taken seriously. Why are we consistently left to have a lower quality of life just because our doctor lacks empathy and thinks all women are over dramatic hypochondriacs?
It’s all too common for us to be told our pain is in our heads, especially when it’s a female specific disease many medical professionals don’t have an understanding of, e.g. Endometriosis. Funnily enough, we know our own bodies and can tell when something’s wrong, so why are we being told our symptoms aren’t a big deal? It just leads to unnecessary suffering and delays in treatments.
Shockingly this type of discrimination extends to public places. The American Heart Association found that only 39% of women are likely to be given CPR (against 45% of men). Some of the reasons given by people as to why they won’t perform CPR on a woman include: fear of touching breasts; thinking women don’t have cardiac arrests; assuming women are just being dramatic.
So not only are we fighting to be heard by medical professionals, we’re also fighting for survival. This isn’t only unfair, it’s preventable.
Women are also significantly more likely to be diagnosed with anxiety and/or depression than men. This only increases for minority groups as the British Medical Association (BMA) outlines: “Rates of self-harm and suicidal behaviour are higher for women in minority ethnic communities than for women in the majority community”.
Most therapies are still based on male experiences which further proves that the healthcare system has not been designed with women in mind. There’s definitely an urgent need for medical professionals to educate themselves on unconscious bias and women’s health, so that we can access the healthcare we not only deserve, but we’re entitled to.
This World Health Day, share your stories so the importance of your and our health can be recognised. The more we talk about the health inequalities we face as women, the more we cannot be ignored. It’s time to make meaningful change and build a better, fairer world.
You can find more of the campaign plans and materials on the World Health Organisation’s World Health Day 2021 page.