Tailored health awareness and literacy

MEN'S HEALTH MANIFESTO: Especially among boys

Support school Personal, Social, Health and Economic Education (PSHE) to include:

  • Diet, activity, sexual and mental health, first aid and self-care for men and boys
  • Understanding and using the health system
  • Development of empathy and emotional intelligence and healthy sexual behaviour
  • Tackling mental health stigma
  • Male-tailored information and education – for men and boys
  • Support men’s desire for information about their conditions
  • Invest in building symptom awareness – especially for cancer, obstructive sleep apnoea and depression. Social marketing to support lifestyle change

Why is this important?

  • There are lower levels of health awareness among men than women.
  • One study found that men were than twice as likely as women to have inadequate health literacy.
  • Men are less likely to know how to contact an out-of-hours GP.
  • A large study of British adults found that women were more likely than men to recall seven out of nine cancer warning signs.

Men's life expectancy and deprivation, the social gradient

 

 

 

 

 

 

> Next section: Organisational focus across the whole health system

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