International Women’s Day ‘Accelerate Action’ for gender equality.

What comes to mind when you see the words 'gender equality'? Pay, health, human rights or something closer to home? Or none of these, as gender equality can mean a lot of different things to different people.

In the UK, women represent 51% of the population, and this year’s International Women’s Day, we are accelerating action for gender equality. At Frimley Health and Care, we are dedicated to prioritising women’s health as part of our commitment to drive meaningful action. 

Dr Lalitha Iyer, Chief Medical Officer, Women’s Health Champion and the Senior Responsible Officer for maternity, shares a project that is helping break down the language barrier for some birthing people.

‘’We are working to address the language barriers that birthing people may have experienced in the past, to try to ensure that language is not a barrier in the future.

‘’In January, we launched face-to-face anti-natal classes in Urdu and Nepali. It was important for us to host them in spaces that felt familiar. We chose the Nepali Community Centre in Rushmore and the JMIC Mosque in Slough.

The classes are run by midwives who are fluent in these languages, and each class runs on alternate months and lasts an hour. This hour provides essential information for birthing people.

On the back of the success of these sessions, we have launched additional guidance for staff working in maternity wards on how to use the interpreting service, we have distributed posters for the ward areas highlighting that the interpreter service is free in our top languages.

We want to ensure that everyone who could benefit from an interpreter has access to one in a timely manner and that maternity staff are aware of this free service too. Since doing this our website has been updated with a raft of translated material, and rapid communication cards with key messages translated into top languages have been made available on wards. We hope that soon, language will no longer be a barrier for birthing people’’.

Dr Azmy Birdi, Clinical Lead for Women’s Health shares the experience of a pilot that ran in October 2023.  

‘’We ran a series of 12 sessions on optimising health in menopause, with a focus on weight.

‘’To run the pilot, we collaborated with Harley Street at home, a private company that ran remote sessions and in practice face to face sessions. We gave a 1-hour session covering nutrition, food choices, and exercises, as well as where to access online exercise classes, followed by 30 minutes where the health coaches and I spoke on various aspects of menopause, and we ran a Q&A.

The pilot was successful. Women came every Monday evening and even the last one which was a week before Christmas was full! We also gave women the option to watch online to maximise reach. The feedback was good; one woman reversed her Type 2 Diabetes’’.

These are two examples of some of the great work that is happening in Frimley, and it also meets one of our ambitions: Ensuring all of our diverse populations are represented with the creation of an ICS inclusivity framework.

The 2024 MBRRACE UK released a report ‘Saving Lives, Improving Mother’s Care' and this report looked at the cases of women dying during pregnancy or dying during the year after giving birth. The latest data revealed that minority women have poorer health outcomes when it comes to maternal health. This report shows that the maternal death rate in the UK has increased, rising to 53% for the period 2020-22 compared to the previous three-year period. More than one-third, that’s 34% of all maternal deaths recorded in this period were mental health related. Compared to their white counterparts, Black women were three times more likely to die during pregnancy, and Asian women were almost twice as likely.

By providing culturally sensitive maternity care, antenatal classes and birthing information in different languages, will accelerate action to bring that number down.

Heart disease is another health inequality that is not often associated with women, but 3.6 million women are living with a heart or circulatory disease in the UK.  Women can often go undiagnosed as the symptoms do not always present the same as in men and are not always recognised as signs of a heart attack, meaning getting the right help can be delayed. Together with gender inequalities in heart attack care, and heart disease being typically seen as a ‘male health issue’, this can cost women their lives. So, let’s accelerate action and familiarise ourselves with the symptoms of heart disease, and when the pain in your body changes, becomes more intense, or shifts. These are some of the symptoms that a heart attack can include:

• chest pain, or discomfort that doesn’t go away
• a feeling of pressure, tightness, heaviness or squeezing in your chest
• pain goes down your left arm, or both arms and it feels like it’s spreading to your neck, jaw, back or stomach
• feeling sick, sweaty, light-headed or short of breath

It is important not to overlook the symptoms of a heart attack, as delaying proper diagnosis can have serious consequences for women. As women, we’re often accustomed to managing discomfort. But if it feels unfamiliar, unusual, or persistent, it’s crucial to seek the right help and to ensure you get the proper diagnosis.

We need to accelerate action and start to tip the scales for gender equality when it comes to women’s health. Women need to feel safe and listened to in our healthcare system. Whether that’s translating more health information into other languages to reach wider communities, or education for the young and the elderly on different women’s health issues could help women have a healthy life expectancy.

Collectively, we can #AccelerateAction for gender equality. Making the right choices will benefit us now and for generations to come.

Maternity at Frimley Health and Care website.