HEALTH WARNING
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HEALTH WARNING
We are no longer updating our Covid-19 hub regularly. That includes this page. Click here for the latest.
Why is gender-sensitive health care so hard?
01/03/21 .
Blog
I read a great article at the week-end pointing out how oestrogen protects women against Covid-19.
It appears to reduce the risk of catching the virus, of dying from it and of Long Covid. The author Kate Muir cited a number of studies and asked very simply: why, if the hormone helps women, is it not being prescribed?
Good question. This is exactly what the Men’s Health Forum is talking about when it calls for gender-sensitivity in health.
Men and women have different hormones, different chromosomes, different lifestyles, different social expectations. It seems daft not to consider those when providing health care. If oestrogen helps women fight off Covid-19, use it.
Let's 'follow the science'
This is exactly the same argument as we made when we urged the Joint Committee on Vaccines and Immunisation to reach out to men. Why? Because age-standardised mortality figures suggest that at any given age men are twice as likely to die of Covid-19 as women - a fact that health care providers should be making men aware of. The increased Covid risk also applies, of course, to people from a BAME background. And, nobody should be afraid to say so.
To coin a phrase, it’s about following the science and reacting accordingly. Why is it so difficult?
The Covid pandemic has demonstrated beyond doubt that sex and gender matter hugely in health. Both men's health and women's health suffer when it's ignored. There are a lot of lessons to be learned from the pandemic: the need for sex and gender to be properly reflected in health care policy and practice is one of them.
Jim Pollard,
Editor
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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.
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