At the end of last year, Research Ambassador and Collaborate Essex member Marianne attended a conference on women’s health hosted by the King’s Fund. In this month’s Research Reflections blog, she reflects on the conference, issues that arose during the day, and why responses to women’s health concerns must improve.
My name is Marianne and I volunteer for Healthwatch Essex as a Collaborate Essex forum member and a Research Ambassador. Within these roles, I aim to offer helpful insights drawing from my disabilities and lived experience. I recently attended the King’s Fund ‘Putting a Spotlight on Women’s Health’ conference. It was a bit of a mixed bag as an event. There were some good points. I felt that the sheer amount of data that was shared was incredibly interesting, lots of statistics and figures showed disparity in care and health equity, they had mainly female speakers and a quite spectacular lasagne at lunch. However, I did spend the train journey home feeling a little flat and felt that I should explore why.
A disappointing aspect of the women’s health conference was the deafening absence of men in the room. I believe I counted a meagre five. A conference simply about ‘health’ would have drawn plenty of men to attend but use the ‘W’ word and all of a sudden, they either seem to lose interest or assume it isn’t for them. It was mentioned by a few of the speakers on the day and the male chair at the beginning apologised and felt he shouldn’t have been given the position but did explain he was filling in for his female colleague at short notice.
I was really let down by the absence of any mention of fatphobia and the often-fatal effects it has. Time and time again you hear about women going to the doctors, whether it be a GP or consultant, and they’re told they should just go away and lose weight. They are denied surgery on grounds of weight, symptoms are not explored, diagnoses are delayed or never reached. Women are constantly not being listened to if they exist in a larger body. I, at one point, made my frustrations known on the Slido app, comments from which were being broadcast on a big screen in the conference room, and it seemed that a lot of people there agreed with me also. I got chatting to a woman in the queue for the aforementioned lasagne who was also feeling just as let-down, albeit with less of an air of resignation than I could muster.
Read the full blog here: https://healthwatchessex.org.uk/2024/01/a-lost-opportunity-my-reflections-on-a-womens-health-conference/
