Last year we saw the ratification of the WHO Regional Office for Europe Men’s Health Strategy and the launch of their report. It was such an honour to be working the Gender and Health team as they worked towards this historic event. Having one WHO Region making the statement that the health of men and boys is important opens the door to others following suit and hopefully at some point we will get a global statement from the WHO in Geneva.
I was also very fortunate to be awarded the William Evan’s Fellowship at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Spending three weeks with Professor Dave Baxter and his great team at his Centre for Men’s Health in March 2019 was such an amazing experience.
The rest of my year was spent on the State of Women’s Health in Leeds report, with the Leeds Public Health team and Women’s Lives Leeds. This may seem odd for a Professor of Men’s Health, but anyone who has followed my work will know that I have a strong background in collaborating on women’s health issues and on gender and health.
Over the years I have been involved in the work done for GenderBasic (photo!) and I was a member of the EC Framework 7 Programme Building Institutional Capacity for Action on Gender Dimension in Science (genSET) Stakeholder Network. I was also part of the EU
Commission study on Gender and Coronary Artery Disease (genCAD) and am currently a Steering Committee member of the AdvanceGender project and I am on the Awards Panel for the BIH Excellence Award for Sex and Gender Aspects in Health Research. More recently I have been invited to be a Steering Committee member of the WHO Community of Practice on Women and Non-communicable Diseases.
So being asked to help develop the State of Women’s Health in Leeds report as a follow on from our previous State of Men’s Health in Leeds report was, I thought, not so daunting.
The women’s health report was a result of a number of factors, it was a recommendation from our report, it was specifically called for by the Women’s Lives Leeds (WLL) consortium and it was also in recognition of the importance of gender in health by the Leeds Public Health team. Ian Cameron, in his 2017/2018 Director of Public Health report focused onto sex and gender differences.
There was an excellent team helping pull the report together, with the then Chair of WLL - Kate Bratt-Farrar, Jeannette Morris-Boam - the project manager from WLL, Amanda Seims, who used to be the research officer in our Centre and a corner-stone of our men’s health report, and the Leeds Public Health team. Tim Taylor, the then Head of Public Health (Localities and Primary Care) lead the project, supported by Aneesa Anwar, his senior administrative officer and Richard Dixon the Public Health Intelligence Manager.
It turned out that the report was a significant undertaking and one that was utterly fascinating and worthwhile for me personally as well as creating a resource for the City and wider afield.
What the report did for me was to fully cement the realisation that nearly all aspects of our health and social wellbeing can be linked to our biological sex and/or our socio-cultural gender. For every aspect of the report there was a literature highlighting the differences between boys and girls and men and women. If you take the men’s report and the women’s report as you go through you see very different perspectives, whether it be the implications of diabetes, the mental health challenges men and women face, the impact of poverty or how risky lifestyles play out.
Powerful socialising forces kick in early in a child’s life and the pressures both girls and boys experience as they mature into adulthood combine with the biological effects of puberty and other sex-related factors to create quite sex/gender specific influences on men and women’s health and wellbeing.
What was stark in the report was how much stigma and hidden distress is to be found in women through their reproductive years both as a result of both their natural cycles and when problems emerge. This is compounded by a widespread ignorance of the menopause and other ‘normal’ events in a woman’s life. The physical and emotional effects of childbearing and birth can also have life-long implications.
This report acts as an important reminder that we are nowhere near understanding women’s health – as some would believe we are. There are huge gaps in the research in both men and women’s health and we have got to work together to support the mutual benefits to us all of having more extensive research programmes and more focused service provision.
To date we have had a great response to the report, with presentations and discussions at the Health & Wellbeing Board and the Senior Leadership Team at the Council along with other events across the city. There is now a series of meetings being held with key groups within the City as we prepare for a full workshop on the findings of the report with the Health & Wellbeing Board in October. There is also another workshop in November to discuss the implications of the report’s findings for the those working in the 3rd and Voluntary Sector in Leeds. These are also opportunities to go back to the findings of the men’s health report and to discuss the challenges men are also facing across the city.
Having gender being accepted as a key factor in the health and social wellbeing of the Leeds population sets the city apart from all others. The lessons learnt will be invaluable for anyone seeking to adopt the same approach.
I was also very fortunate to be awarded the William Evan’s Fellowship at the University of Otago in Dunedin, New Zealand. Spending three weeks with Professor Dave Baxter and his great team at his Centre for Men’s Health in March 2019 was such an amazing experience.
The rest of my year was spent on the State of Women’s Health in Leeds report, with the Leeds Public Health team and Women’s Lives Leeds. This may seem odd for a Professor of Men’s Health, but anyone who has followed my work will know that I have a strong background in collaborating on women’s health issues and on gender and health.
Over the years I have been involved in the work done for GenderBasic (photo!) and I was a member of the EC Framework 7 Programme Building Institutional Capacity for Action on Gender Dimension in Science (genSET) Stakeholder Network. I was also part of the EU
Commission study on Gender and Coronary Artery Disease (genCAD) and am currently a Steering Committee member of the AdvanceGender project and I am on the Awards Panel for the BIH Excellence Award for Sex and Gender Aspects in Health Research. More recently I have been invited to be a Steering Committee member of the WHO Community of Practice on Women and Non-communicable Diseases.
So being asked to help develop the State of Women’s Health in Leeds report as a follow on from our previous State of Men’s Health in Leeds report was, I thought, not so daunting.
The women’s health report was a result of a number of factors, it was a recommendation from our report, it was specifically called for by the Women’s Lives Leeds (WLL) consortium and it was also in recognition of the importance of gender in health by the Leeds Public Health team. Ian Cameron, in his 2017/2018 Director of Public Health report focused onto sex and gender differences.
There was an excellent team helping pull the report together, with the then Chair of WLL - Kate Bratt-Farrar, Jeannette Morris-Boam - the project manager from WLL, Amanda Seims, who used to be the research officer in our Centre and a corner-stone of our men’s health report, and the Leeds Public Health team. Tim Taylor, the then Head of Public Health (Localities and Primary Care) lead the project, supported by Aneesa Anwar, his senior administrative officer and Richard Dixon the Public Health Intelligence Manager.
It turned out that the report was a significant undertaking and one that was utterly fascinating and worthwhile for me personally as well as creating a resource for the City and wider afield.
What the report did for me was to fully cement the realisation that nearly all aspects of our health and social wellbeing can be linked to our biological sex and/or our socio-cultural gender. For every aspect of the report there was a literature highlighting the differences between boys and girls and men and women. If you take the men’s report and the women’s report as you go through you see very different perspectives, whether it be the implications of diabetes, the mental health challenges men and women face, the impact of poverty or how risky lifestyles play out.
Powerful socialising forces kick in early in a child’s life and the pressures both girls and boys experience as they mature into adulthood combine with the biological effects of puberty and other sex-related factors to create quite sex/gender specific influences on men and women’s health and wellbeing.
What was stark in the report was how much stigma and hidden distress is to be found in women through their reproductive years both as a result of both their natural cycles and when problems emerge. This is compounded by a widespread ignorance of the menopause and other ‘normal’ events in a woman’s life. The physical and emotional effects of childbearing and birth can also have life-long implications.
This report acts as an important reminder that we are nowhere near understanding women’s health – as some would believe we are. There are huge gaps in the research in both men and women’s health and we have got to work together to support the mutual benefits to us all of having more extensive research programmes and more focused service provision.
To date we have had a great response to the report, with presentations and discussions at the Health & Wellbeing Board and the Senior Leadership Team at the Council along with other events across the city. There is now a series of meetings being held with key groups within the City as we prepare for a full workshop on the findings of the report with the Health & Wellbeing Board in October. There is also another workshop in November to discuss the implications of the report’s findings for the those working in the 3rd and Voluntary Sector in Leeds. These are also opportunities to go back to the findings of the men’s health report and to discuss the challenges men are also facing across the city.
Having gender being accepted as a key factor in the health and social wellbeing of the Leeds population sets the city apart from all others. The lessons learnt will be invaluable for anyone seeking to adopt the same approach.
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