At last, a Women's Health Strategy for England

08/03/21 . Blog

The government’s decision to launch a women’s health strategy for England is excellent news for the health of the nation.

There are clearly many areas of health where the current approach does not lead to the best outcomes for women. We wrote about one last week (Research suggests oestrogen protects women from Covid-19). Female health attacks are often under-recognised. Many drugs are tested on men with the result that they work less well on women. The list goes on.

Next: a men's strategy

This is the welcome, and long over-due, first step to gender-sensitive healthcare. The logical next step is men’s health strategy of the type the Forum has been calling for for some time and which the Women and Equalities Committee in the last parliament backed. Many of you may even have signed the petition already.

We also need similar strategies for all the countries of the UK.

The vaccine committee, the JCVI, has already recognised the importance of considering gender. Now the government has. The announcement of the women’s strategy has been timed for International Women’s Day (8 March). How about announcing the launch of the men’s health strategy in this year’s Men’s Health Week (14-21 June)?

Jim Pollard,
​Editor

 

 

 

The Men’s Health Forum need your support

It’s tough for men to ask for help but if you don’t ask when you need it, things generally only get worse. So we’re asking.

In the UK, one man in five dies before the age of 65. If we had health policies and services that better reflected the needs of the whole population, it might not be like that. But it is. Policies and services and indeed men have been like this for a long time and they don’t change overnight just because we want them to.

It’s true that the UK’s men don’t have it bad compared to some other groups. We’re not asking you to ‘feel sorry’ for men or put them first. We’re talking here about something more complicated, something that falls outside the traditional charity fund-raising model of ‘doing something for those less fortunate than ourselves’. That model raises money but it seldom changes much. We’re talking about changing the way we look at the world. There is nothing inevitable about premature male death. Services accessible to all, a population better informed. These would benefit everyone - rich and poor, young and old, male and female - and that’s what we’re campaigning for.

We’re not asking you to look at images of pity, we’re just asking you to look around at the society you live in, at the men you know and at the families with sons, fathers and grandads missing.

Here’s our fund-raising page - please chip in if you can.

Registered with the Fundraising Regulator