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Health Status Health Services Health Care Reform Diverse Communities of Women
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When It Comes to Health, Do Sex and Gender Matter? Exciting new research is emerging from Canada's five Centres of Excellence for Women's Health that addresses this provocative and important question. Funded by Health Canada to explore the social determinants of health, the Centres are beginning to amass significant findings that will be of value to researchers, policy makers, women's health service providers and women themselves. This inaugural edition of the Research Bulletin presents summaries of studies, some complete, some in progress, that run the gamut from small, exploratory examinations of women's experiences of informal caregiving to large-scale analyses of administrative data collected by provincial ministries of health. A rich variety of methods and focus are in evidence, from qualitative discussions of the barriers teens face when they try to access information about sexual health to assessments of health status based on national surveys. These various new insights and data construct an early bridge across the gaps in our knowledge about the social determinants of health, including the role of health policy in shaping health, and the ways in which these determinants interact with sex and gender. The Bulletin presents the studies in four broad categories. Studies that use gender as a critical analytic lens are presented first. They demonstrate that gender is a useful and discerning lens with which to examine population health trends, and raise questions about the accuracy of our assumptions about the similarities and differences between women's and men's health. Do women suffer from more ill health than men over the life course? How do paid and unpaid work affect the health of both women and men? Traditionally, studies have assumed that paid work was the more important factor in understanding men's health, whereas unpaid work was key to women's health. Researchers are beginning to argue that we need to consider how both forms of work affect health for both women and men. Health Care Utilization And Gender: A Pilot Study Using the BC Linked Health Data and the National Gender Economic Costing Group both investigate health services using sex/gender to detect patterns in consumers' use of health services. In each case, the researchers designed innovative methods to document health services utilization, taking into account the social roles, personal histories, and economic circumstances of men and women that lead them to have different, and hence, gendered experiences within the health system and/or of health conditions. Both of these reports will interest decision makers concerned with the effective use of health care resources. Home care from the perspective of the person receiving care, and home care from the perspective of informal caregivers are the subjects of two different studies on health care reform. Both introduce us to the reality that families and patients who need or receive care in the home face enormous challenges in terms of managing the physical, psychological and financial effects of caregiving. In contrast, Invisible Women, examines a different aspect of health care reform, namely health planning under regional health authorities in Saskatchewan and Manitoba. This work demonstrates that these regional structures have little experience and/or technical expertise to incorporate concerns about women's health into their health plans or needs assessments. Women reflecting the diversity of communities of women are the subject of the final group of studies presented here. These four reports detail the experiences of women with mental health problems, immigrant and refugee women, adolescent girls, and rural and remote women. In each case it was found that being female exacerbates the difficulties of coping with ill health. Consistently, these studies tell us that when it comes to health, sex matters. While in some cases, sex is the difference that makes no difference, in others, sex is the difference that makes all the difference. It is our job as decision makers, researchers and health care providers to find out which case is which in order to ensure that our health systems respond appropriately and that ultimately we are better equipped to improve the health of all Canadians. Ann Pederson |
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