Urquhart said she set out to claim the record in some of the harshest and coldest conditions on earth to not only push the limits of her own body but also to inspire other women and girls. 

“By pushing my own physical boundaries in this world-record attempt I want to show young girls and women what’s possible when you harness the power of the body and mind,” said Urquhart. 

In order to prepare for the polar marathon, Urquhart trained for nine months, with her training involved running on a treadmill in a refrigerated shipping container that mimicked the conditions she would face. The container– basically a freezer– could be set to a temperature as low as -40C.

However Urquhart said nothing compared to actually being in the Antarctica and experiencing the extreme conditions first-hand. 

She set out on her adventure on December 15, running up to 60km each day to complete a total of 1312.26km in 26 days. Her momentous run was completed on a 10km loop at Union Glacier Camp in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest and driest desert on earth.

“The wind was howling and really strong, to the point where you don’t have the brain power- you almost just shrivel up”, she told SBS, noting that the physical pain left within the first week as her body adapted to the conditions. 

The feat surpassed Pat Farmer’s previous record of a 1200m in the arctic as part of his Pole-to-Pole expedition. While Urquhart’s record still needs to be officially signed off from Guinness World Records, it looks to have beaten the standing record. 

“It’s a bit surreal to be honest,” Urquhart told AAP on Friday after completing the ultramarathon.

“I feel like I need to pinch myself and then I’ll wake up tomorrow and need to run it again.”

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Urquhart and her team, Run Antarctica, will be returning to Melbourne on Tuesday, having raised around $75,000 already to support young girls and women in sport. Her goal is to “raise $1.5 million for charities supporting young girls and women in sport by delivering education training programs that strengthen and empower the body and mind”. 

Ahead of her attempt, Urquhart told Sunrise that her dedication to the cause would see help motivate her through the challenges of the record-breaking run. 

“We’re aiming to educate and empower girls in sport because 50 per cent of girls drop out of sport during their teenage years,” she said. 

“They find it can be stressful and one of the key reasons is a lack of confidence in their skills and abilities, so we’re looking to raise awareness and funds to support them through our charity partners.”

The push to get more women involved in ultra-running

Around the world, there’s been a push to get more women involved in extreme endurance sports, such as ultra-running. 

This comes as the Covid pandemic resulted in a 10 per cent drop in female participation across running events of all distances, according to 2023 data from Runner’s World. 

One recent campaign in the UK, the Ultra 50:50 from ultramarathon organisers Threshold Sports, is aiming to achieve 50 per cent female participation in its events in 2024. 

Through its own data collection, Threshold Sports has found that female participation in 5k races in the UK has fallen from 66 per cent in 2019 to 52 per cent in 2023.  The disparity is especially prevalent in ultras, where women make up fewer than a third of participants. Female participation in UK ultras dropped from a depressingly low 32 per cent in 2022 to just 30 per cent in 2023. 

To identify the challenges women face when preparing for and taking part in ultramarathons, Threshold Sports and their partners surveyed over 500 female ultrarunners. The results pointed to five key factors including female representation and perceptions, training and preparation, access and support at events, safety and harassment, as well as menstrual health and menopause. 

The number one barrier to female participation was cited as “safety” by one in three female ultra runners, due to harassment concerns and fear of running alone at night or in remote areas.

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The campaign isn’t simply pushing for women to get involved in its own running events, but is hoping to inspire women to toe the start line in all types of races. 

To do this, Threshold Sports has adopted the SheRACES guidelines– a set of guidelines that race directors can follow to ensure races are supportive of female participants. The guidelines range from things like ensuring there are adequate female toilet facilities to  providing sanitary products to having equal prize money in competitions. 

The group is hoping that by showcasing their own changes, it will provide a blueprint for other event organisers to share in their mission of supporting women and achieving gender parity. 

In the build-up to Threshold Sports’ 2024 events season, they’ve also recruited a team of female ultra-runners, or “Challengers” to inspire other women to take up the sport. 

One of the Challengers, Romey said: “Becoming a mum is incredible, but it is all-consuming. Signing up to an event I would have completed before parenthood helps me feel like myself again. Plus, I hope to make my daughter proud of her mum one day.”

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Culturally and linguistically diverse women, women with disabilities, and those within the LGBTQI+ community are some of the groups that face additional barriers accessing and receiving adequate healthcare. This week, we’re looking into how we can ensure quality healthcare is delivered for all women in Australia, across all backgrounds, religions, and contexts. We also investigate some of the ways we can protect the women currently left behind by the system’s failure to safeguard everyone.

There are major gaps in outcomes experienced by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women in today’s health system, something that stems from a long history of racism and exclusion. While Australia is considered one of the safest countries in the world to give birth, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are three time more likely than non-Indigenous women to experience maternal death. They are twice as likely to have cardiovascular disease and experience higher rates of many cancers, including breast, ovarian and cervical cancer.

As Donna Murray, the CEO of Indigenous Allied Health Australia recently told our Womens Health @ Work Summit, some of these gaps can be due to a lack of access to services.

“If you take breast cancer, as an example, the data will show us in 2018 that only 37% of Indigenous women aged between 50 and 69 participated in the breast screening program compared to 54% of non-Indigenous women,” Murray said.

“Yet, we’re more likely to be diagnosed with breast cancer. So, access to services is critical to special services, but also making sure that’s culturally safe and responsive, making sure we have access to communication and educational resources that are appropriate for Aboriginal Torres Strait Islander women.”

Data on domestic and family violence shows Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women are 32 times more likely to be hospitalised from violence. Linda Burney, federal shadow Minister for Families and Social Services and for Preventing Family Violence, told our Summit that we must focus on making sure Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women have access to safe and adequate housing in order to improve health outcomes.

“I have come to the view that we can have all the best domestic violence policies in the world, we can have all the best health policies in the world, but if you don’t have the fundamental building block of decent housing, then the rest is a waste of money,” Burney says.

“We need to understand there is another world in this country and that world is poverty. It is 20 people living in a three-bedroom home. It is the lack of capacity to turn on the tap and get clean water and it is impossible to stay safe and healthy in an environment where the living conditions are intolerable.”

Meryl Jones, a refugee health nurse, also features on the Women’s Health Project this week, sharing some of the issues migrant and refugee women in Australia experience when it comes to accessing Medicare and appropriate services, like interpreters.

Jones says without access to Medicare, some migrant and refugee women can’t get to a GP, or access hospital services including essential health screenings. She points out that investing in accessibility now would actually save a lot of costs in the health system down the track.

“If we’re going to get down to health dollars, it actually saves lots of costs across the health system. Because, using interpreters, for example, reduces the risks of medical errors, which first and foremost, is important for individual patients, but if we’re going to be cold and hard-nosed about it, it also saves money across the health system as well.”

So what would make our healthcare system more inclusive?

First, we need a greater understanding of the gaps. Then, commitments – particularly dedicated funding – for closing them.

Also, a more diverse and inclusive workforce would go a long way to improving outcomes for marginalised women. And it would help to ensure culturally responsive care is actually embedded in the system. Improving continuing education for healthcare professionals would also be a good step.

“Health professionals need to understand the complete person when they’re working with individuals,” says Mary Patetsos, the Chair of the Federation of Ethnic Communities Councils of Australia.

“Women interface with their families and almost always are the custodians of the health of the family. So it’s really important to make sure that we message, we empower women to communicate back to families why things are important.”

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But there are other massive gender gaps continuing right now that are impacting women’s retirement savings and security, and her health.

That is the inventor gap. The investment gap. And other gaps impacting how women’s health needs get the attention, the funding, and the catch-up it needs to see all areas of women’s health that have for too long been overlooked, finally addressed.

What we do know is that when women are innovating and building businesses in health, they tend to address women’s health needs.

We see it among the female entrepreneurs securing funding and developing products and services to support women’s health.

We see it in digital health, where female founders are offering new models for delivering health services to women.

And we see it in biomedical patents, where female-led inventions in this space so often address women’s health needs.

Indeed Harvard Business Review’s analysis of decades of biomedical patents published last year found that those created by women were 35% more likely to benefit women’s health than those created by men. 

(The problem? Just 4 per cent of biomedical patented inventions are created by all-female teams. The issue is continuing, just 12.8% of inventors receiving patents in the US in 2020 were female). 

As the Women’s Health Project podcast returns this week, we look at the massive push by women to change the business of women’s health, including how care is delivered, thanks to the support of Organon, the recently launched pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman.

For this episode, I spoke to a number of different women at the forefront of this shift.

I start with Alice Williams, the founder of Ovira, an Australian women’s health brand supporting women those experiencing period pain, which has raised millions in funding.

Alice had no background in business before starting Ovira. She never had a nine-to-five job. 

But what she did have was horrendous period pain. As well as frustration with the options previously available. While researching ways to relieve period pain, she came across electrotherapy, and then a business idea: to create an easy-to-use device that women could discreetly access whenever and wherever they needed it. 

Raising capital hasn’t been easy, Alice said.

“I had another man, when I was pitching, stop me halfway through a pitch and said, “Ah, sorry. Can I just stop you there, Alice? What right do you have to be doing this? Like, who are you? You’re 20-something year old woman trying to bring a medical device to market.” So yeah, I’ve seen and heard it all.”

But she’s sensing some momentum for change.

“I do think there has been a change and I think investors are more open to investing in women, which they should be because if you actually look at the data out, we make more money. 

“So we’re actually more successful and it’s probably because we have to work so much harder.

Part of the shift in investors understanding this area is being supported by the rise in femtech.

Femtech is a term believed to have been first coined by Ida Tin, the founder of a period tracking app called Clue. She used the term to describe and get more people interested in these emerging tech-based companies dedicated to women’s health and research together. She thought it’d not only be empowering, but also make it easier for investors and media to talk about and accept the businesses within the category. 

Megan Capriccio is the CEO and Founder of the FemTech collective. 

“Femtech is female health technologies,” she explains on the podcast. “It’s applied to products, services, hardware, therapeutic drugs and vitamins, digital platforms, telehealth, consumer products. All with the thought in mind to improve or support women’s health.”

Digital Health is another area that’s booming right now. 

It’s creating significant benefits for women, especially for those with caring responsibilities. Making access to healthcare needs much simpler and faster. 

And it also happens to be a space of entrepreneurship where women are represented in far greater numbers than other areas, and they’re accessing capital and opportunities. 

I spoke to Bronwyn Le Grice, the CEO and managing director of ANDHealth, a not-for-profit digital health agency helping to accelerate the commercialization of evidence-based digital health technologies in Australia. 

Of the 166 companies on ANDHealth’s database, 52 per cent have a female founder, and 42 per cent have a female CEO. These are figures that far outnumber other accelerators and other industry sectors. It could be that ANDHealth is attracting this diversity, especially being founded by a woman and being predominantly female run. 

But there are other factors, too

“One of the reasons we see a relatively high proportion of female founders, and this is different to MedTech and BioTech, by the way, is because we see a lot of clinician carer and patient-led innovations,” said Bronwyn.

“So our innovation doesn’t come necessarily through an academic research pathway that you might see in a BioTech. It’s not influenced by hierarchies that have existed for a very long time. Our founders come from tech, they [are] nurses, psychologists, pharmaceutical professionals, [they] come from everywhere”

Meanwhile, new businesses are also emerging aiming to turn how women’s healthcare is provided.

One such business is Women’s Health Road, founded by obstetrician Dr Talat Uppal, which puts a number of different women’s health services under the one roof — and where everything from the design of the waiting room to where people interact, is carefully planned to best support women’s emotional and physical health needs.

“I honestly believe that the future of health is very collaborative, and that old-fashioned, vision of a specialist in their room or by themselves seeing patient after patient for the waiting room, I think it’s a little bit outdated,” Dr Uppal explained.

The growing interest in femtech, in digital health, in innovation around patient care and the care sector, as well as in female health practitioners going on to become founders, is not only going to be hugely significant for women, but also for everyone.

The post How women-led businesses are targeting women’s health to address long-overlooked gaps in care appeared first on Women's Agenda.

That will depend on who you talk to. Or rather who is talking to you, at any point of the day.

On TV, in the media, and 24/7 on social media, via the influencers and fitfluencers sharing what’s become an ideal version of arms, legs, abs and buts. 

Every day, we’re exposed to a version of what it means to be fit as a woman. To some extent, it can be inspiring and motivating. But to another extent, actually harmful and even toxic. 

On the latest installment of the Women’s Health Project, our podcast series supported by Organon, we’re diving into the world of fitness and body image, particularly how pressures to be a certain kind of “healthy” have evolved with social media. 

We ask how “women’s health” became synonymous with fitness and dieting, and how “healthy” one appears on the outside. 

Pressures around exercise are a load that many women carry on top of other loads: like the load of paid and unpaid work, of caring responsibilities, of sexism and so much more. 

But this load is a little more complex. In some cases, women simply have no capacity to carry it, meaning they don’t have the opportunity to participate in regular physical activity. 

In other cases, it can be an added stress in the lives of women. You’re only ever one click away from an endless range of exercise programs, as well as individuals who’ll be telling you how to exercise and how to achieve the body and version of “health” they have, via the fifluencers and influencers on Instagram. 

Fitfluencers have the aesthetics and therefore (we’re led to believe) the answers. But they don’t always have the qualifications. Regardless, they’ll have the program to follow: the 20 minute body transformation, the Abs Explosion or something else. Just follow their lead (and in many cases their diets) and you’ll achieve their results.  

The problem, of course, is that we don’t all respond to exercise in the same way. Nor do we share the same abilities for recreating the movements being asked of us. 

And we don’t all have the time. 

The impossibility and the complexity behind the messaging put out around the perfect way to exercise and what it means to be fit as a woman, can lead some to simply tune out altogether. 

In this episode, heart surgeon Dr Nikki Stamp shares more on her own journey with exercise, including how it was well into her thirties before she recovered from the extreme exercise and goals she was chasing as a younger woman. 

She says there are problems in perceptions of what it means to be “healthy”. 

“It is sold in the form of Instagram influencers, some of who have millions and millions of followers, and millions and millions of dollars to match, who have built empires based on what their body or other’s bodies look like,” she says.

“At the moment, we’re told that to be healthy, we need to look healthy by fitting into the current cultural ideal, which is to have very low body fat, large backside and large breasts with the tiniest waist that you have ever seen, which is very, very difficult to attain, if not impossible for a lot of us.

“To be “healthy”, we also need to have this perfect adherence to a diet that might be called clean or another kind of popular dietary pattern. We need to participate in workouts that are on-trend, HIIT, boot camps. Those kinds of things are very popular right now, and once we attain all of this, then we’re told that we’re healthy. “

Social media has a huge part to play evolving pressures on girls ad women around aesthetics. In the episode, we explore more on the role of Instagram and the influence it’s injecting in women’s lives, especially following revelations from a whistleblower and former Facebook employee Frances Haugen, who revealed Facebook’s own research that 32% of teenage girls say Instagram makes them “feel worse” 

We also hear from Clinical psychologist Madeleine Althaus, who has seen the impact social media can have on mental health.

As Madeleine says, the pressures placed on girls and women to look a certain way are certainly not new — think about all those magazine covers and cover lines you’ve seen over the years. But she says that the exposure to certain “ideals” has kicked up a notch in recent years. 

“One thing we need to be really careful and maintain a really critical stance is in anything that becomes an absolute or a binary way of looking at something,” she says.

“So for example, when I work with adolescents, we know it’s already a tricky time for identity building and this goes into a our early 20s as well. It can be a really tricky mechanism in social media where we are seeing anything that is an absolute. It can rack up extreme ideas about a body and what functions it should be serving, wrapped in a highly curated and glamorized way.”

How fit is enough?

There are so many benefits in fitness for women. Physical activity is associated with healthy aging and mental wellbeing. 

But it doesn’t need to be as complex – or as extreme – as we can be led to believe. 

As Professor Cassandra Szoeke notes from a 30 year study of hundreds of women on their activity levels, it’s those who did some form of exercise every day that saw benefits associated with healthy aging. That something changes over the years, but it’s the consistency and daily effort that really matters. 

Meanwhile, there are great benefits in healthy relationships with exercises and routines. On Instagram, where Dr Nikki Stamp mostly shares information on heart health, she also shares positive information on her personal journey with strength training and the goals and friendships she’s achieved with it. 

Exercise and different forms of physical activity can build confidence, resilience, discipline, it can lead to more friendships and life satisfaction, more connections and relationships with others. 

Psychologist Madeleine Althaus’ advice is to consider a balanced view on exercise and to aim to be a lighthouse for others. Fitness and health is so beneficial, but if it’s interfering with other aspects of your life – particularly your physical or mental health – then it could be at an extreme level, that may require some compassion and flexibility to move out of rigid ideals. 

We discuss all of the above and so much more in the latest installment of the Women’s Health Project, our special podcast series supported by Organon, the recently launched pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. 

If you or someone you know has mental health concerns, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

If you or someone you know is experiencing family violence, you can contact 1800 737 732.

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It was my first foray into learning more about the pelvic floor, a part of my own anatomy supporting the pelvic organs that would ultimately help me support and deliver the baby.

I’ll also not forget the first time I learned about pelvic floor physio, about a year later and after sustaining an injury during childbirth.

These physios can measure the extent of pelvic floor dysfunction or damage alongside improvements the patient is making. Rather than just telling patients what exercises to do, they can actually support them in learning how to do these movements, measuring their success and making additional recommendations along the way.

These physios also serve a vital role in getting women back into exercise.

And yet, we don’t always know much about them until we really, really need them (and happen to get the right GP or gynecologist who knows to refer one).

In other parts of the world, pelvic rehabilitation is par for the course of the childbirth experience. In France, women are automatically prescribed ten rehabilitation visits post childbirth that they can choose to take up or not, free of charge. They’re also afforded ten sessions to support the rehabilitation of their abdominal muscles.

And if these sessions aren’t enough? They can return to their doctor to get a referral for ten more.

The result, according to physiotherapists in Paris, is that women and girls understand and discuss their pelvic floor. They have a greater awareness of the pain to watch out for (particularly pain that may be associated with endometriosis or something else) as well. And, overall, France experiences greater public health benefits.

On the latest installment of The Women’s Health Project podcast supported by Organon, we delve into this area of anatomy to learn more about its essential role in supporting overall wellbeing.

Pelvic physio is growing in Australia but we have a lot of catching up to to do. When Heba Shaheed, from the Sydney-based The Pelvic Expert, was studying physio at university, she recalls learning about an hour on women’s health in the fourth year.

It wasn’t until Heba undertook a post-graduate-style course that she ventured into this area, and realised that so many of the health issues she was experiencing were linked to her pelvic floor. She says that incontinence is an issue for many of her patients, but actually, a lot of her work is to support women with pelvic pain, sexual pain, period pain, birth injuries and preparation for pregnancy and childbirth.

She wants greater knowledge and awareness on the pelvic floor shared with women and girls, something she’s actively contributing to through her Instagram presence.

“How can we empower women to even know where to go to heal their bodies if they don’t have that knowledge about this area of health in the first place?” she says on the podcast. “And if when they go to GPs, that the GPs don’t know about pelvic floor physios being an option?”

If you sustain a knee, shoulder or ankle injury, a physio is usually the first option, Heba says. But the same level of consideration is not always provided for pelvic floor-related pain and dysfunction.

That means those experiencing symptoms can go on without realising what options are available.

“There are so many consequences on a personal level, but also on a relationship level,” she says.

“Women may avoid returning to exercise and sport. They may feel disempowered. Afraid, scared to try something new when a doctor is saying ‘you can’t do this and that’. And mental health can definitely be affected too

“That feeling that ‘now I can’t run’, or ‘I can’t go to work without feeling like I need to go to the bathroom’ or that ‘I’m scared I’m going to wet my pants,’ for example.

“Or ‘I’ve got this lower back pain that just doesn’t go away and I can’t sit for more than 30 minutes. I can’t stand and run this meeting I have’. Whatever it might be. It has an impact on everything and it can cause a domino effect.”

Heba goes on to highlight the impact on work, relationships, sex life, exercise life and overall wellbeing for countless women.

Another pelvic physio, Rachel Andrew, agrees. Based in Hobart and running a dedicated pelvic physio practice, she tells the podcast how during her general physio training they didn’t receive the detail needed to understand the anatomy of the pelvic floor and how integral it is to core, abdominal muscles, breathing and the back.

“It’s crazy we’re not taught more about this,” she says.

“Women have no idea about their own bodies, and men have no idea about women’s bodies.”

Like Heba, Rachel believes promoting awareness among girls in school would be beneficial so that they can understand more about their vaginas, and also the deep bowel of muscle that helps support their organs.

It’s been ten years since Heba started as a pelvic floor physio. Back then, the field was even more niche than it is now. She says with millions of women in Australia, this should be a much bigger area of health than it currently is.

She would like to see more options for women to see a pelvic floor physio, given the wide range of different treatment needs.

“I would like women to have the opportunity to see a pelvic floor physio, at least once. You can then make a diagnosis and give her a specific program. I would much rather that people can consult with a pelvic floor physio to get an individual approach before exercises are given.

“Education about the importance of getting your pelvic floor checked, is so important. Just like you go for a postpartum check with your GP, or ho we get our breasts checked. I would love it to be mainstream to have your pelvic floor checked.

Rachel agrees. She wants to see Australia follow the French on making pelvic physio and rehabilitation (especially post childbirth) part of the mainstream. But she’s pleased to see more women taking their healthcare into their own hands and researching and learning more, particularly when it comes to sexual health.

We talk about all this and so much more on the latest episode of The Women’s Health Project. Listen now or subscribe to the full series on your favourite podcasts app.

This is the sixth episode of the Women’s Health Project podcast series is out today.

This podcast is independently created by Women’s Agenda and proudly sponsored by Organon, a pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. Women’s Agenda is published by Agenda Media, a 100% female-owned and run media company.

The post Just squeeze? How our pelvic floors got sidelined appeared first on Women's Agenda.

He directed it towards the one in ten who suffer from endometriosis, noting that the condition should have been acknowledged at an earlier time. In a much more powerful way.

His apology came on behalf of all those in parliament and from the medical system.

The apology, during an Endo Active event in Canberra, featuring a number of different advocacy groups and “Endo Warriors” in the room, marked a major turning point for those who suffer from endometriosis in Australia.

Because previously, endometriosis had gone largely ignored or overlooked.

On this week’s Women’s Health Project, we’re exploring endometriosis in Australia: how far we’ve come, and the very long way we have to go.

It takes an average six and a half years for someone to be diagnosed with endometriosis. And even that is an improvement: that figure is down from an average seven to 12 years a decade ago.

It wasn’t so much that women suffered in silence. But rather that they just suffered, with no real answers or explanations for what was going on. Worse, they were and continue to be told to toughen up and get resilient. That periods are pain, deal with it. As entrepreneur Shivani Gopal told me, it took her half her life to finally get a diagnosis. So often, she said, this type of pain is just “normalised”, when it isn’t normal.

But that’s changing. There have been a number of high-profile spokespeople, like Emma Watkins (AKA the yellow Wiggle) and more recently Amy Schumer, speaking up about their experiences.

And there’s been some powerful work from advocacy groups to get this issue on the national agenda.

Ten years ago, Donna Ciccia co founded Endometriosis Australia, committing her life and career to advocacy work in this space.

For Donna, she started experiencing symptoms at age 16, but it was until she was 31 that she was finally diagnosed.

“​​It was always said to us that we were hypochondriacs, that it was period pain, you just need to harden up. It’s all in your head. Every woman has period pain. You need to harden up, you’re just not resilient.

Endometriosis goes so much further than the disease. So much further than the pain, which is hard enough to deal with or comprehend.

That’s why Endometriosis Australia uses the term Endo Warriors: to highlight how it impacts so many other areas of life – leaving those who suffer to do so with remarkable resilience. Their careers are impacted, their friendships, their relationships, their financial situations.

According to just-released research by Endometriosis Australia, one in six sufferers have lost jobs due to endometriosis. One in three say they have been passed over for promotion. And seven in ten have had to take time off work.

But there has been some progress in this space. There’s federal funding as part of the National Action Plan. There are the clinical guidelines issued by RANZCOG and delivered to GPs across the country, to help them better understand endometriosis and give those they suspect of having it a clinical pathway forward.

“We have come along way. Is there still further to go? Absolutely,” Donna says.

“Research is key. We don’t know what causes it. We don’t know how to prevent it. We don’t know how to cure it. We have no early detection test.

“There is a whole heap of gaps that we need to fill, so research is vital and investment in research is vital.

“Can we do better? We can always do better.

“Do we need more?

We need a bucketload more. When you think there are 830,000 people in Australia, that’s huge.”

Gynecologist Dr Talat Uppal also agrees we’ve come a long way. She says she’s personally seen a shift in her work around women seeking answers, including young women and girls.

“I’m sure there’s still room for us to do better as clinicians and for us, for women to feel more confident to reach out for help. 

“But truly, I feel that we can actually see visibly the benefits of the highlighting of the [issue[ and raising awareness. 

“The national plan that was created a couple of years ago, which focused on the actual awareness and education, as well a the clinical context is making a difference. The more you try to standardize clinical care, it makes it easier is, especially when we’re thinking of women in rural areas or in more vulnerable women, perhaps they don’t speak English or may not be able to access those resources. This makes it easier.

We explore this and much more in the latest episode of The Women’s Health Podcast.

Listen below, or go to iTunes or Spotify to get this episode and others in this special series investigating how women’s health has been sidelined and overlooked.

The Women’s Health Project, a special podcast series created by Women’s Agenda and supported by Organon, the recently launched pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman.  

The post Endometriosis: Four years since Greg Hunt’s apology, what’s changed? appeared first on Women's Agenda.

The campaign around cervical cancer has shown us that if the impetus and leadership exists, then eradication of a disease is more than possible.

Indeed, recent research from the UK shows that the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination, has cut cases of cervical cancer by 90 per cent. And, thanks to innovation and improvements in screening programs, those who typically have a pelvic examination to test for the virus that causes the cancer, will now be able to access a simple, less invasive swab test. The test will be available to eligible Australians from midway through next year.

When I spoke to Professor Marion Saville for the Women’s Health Project podcast, within hours of that announcement regarding the swab test being made, she was clearly excited and optimistic about what lay ahead.

We can’t underestimate the significance and possibility of this swab screening in dismantling some of the barriers that come with a more traditional pelvic examination.

She spoke about how this new swab process would help reach those falling through the cracks of the more traditional pelvic examination process, particularly in reached under-screened populations.

This self-collection method involves a simple swab accessed through a health provider, and similar to a COVID swab — which could be done in a bathroom or behind a curtain. It’s far less invasive than the more traditional screening process and is expected to improve participation rates across currently under-screen populations, including linguistically diverse women and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women.

Professor Saville has been with the VCS Foundation for decades, which changed its name just over a week ago to The Australian Centre for the Prevention of Cervical Cancer to better speak to its key goal of eliminating cervical cancer as a public health problem in the country.

She said Australia may well become the first country to reach the WHO elimination target.

So what’s helped make this happen?   

“It’s not an overnight success. There has been decades of support for an organised approach and has become the national cervical screening program,” she said.

Professor Saville noted a significant drop in cervical cancer numbers that occurred in the 1990s when pap test registers were established and a number of underperforming labs were regulated out.

When those falling numbers plateaued in the early 2000s, there were a couple of new developments: the arrival of the HPV vaccine alongside a comprehensive rollout program, as well as further improvements to screening and the screening reminder process.

But it hasn’t been an equitable result.

“Without doubt equity in our program is the biggest challenge,” says Saville.

“We will be the first country to get there but we don’t want to leave communities behind. Importantly Aboriginal women are two and a half to 3 times more likely to develop this cancer than other Australian women and almost four times as likely to die from it.”

As well as greater attention needed on Indigenous communities, Saville says there is work to do in others like CALD and LGBTQI communities that are often under-screened.

For decades, Professor Saville has been involved in various campaigns to reach under-screened women and seen incremental gains in participation.

But she says around 15% of the eligible screening population are not going to participate in a pelvic examination. That’s why the less invasive swab test will be such a gamechanger.

“In our surveys of acceptability, I would characterise the rates we are seeing as a breakthrough in participation, not an incremental gain.

“It’s not 100%, but in our studies among women refusing a pap smear, we got around 85% to return a swab they collected. Which is far greater than anything we did with reminders and support.

Clearly for some people there is the physical discomfort. There are cultural barriers. There are people who’ve experienced sexual abuse. There are a whole range of reasons why lying down and having a pelvic exam is just not something some people are willing to do.

The announcement is not saying you can’t have a sample collected in the same way, of course, you can. But it’s putting the participant in charge of that decision.”

Then there’s the scalability of the swab test, which just wouldn’t be possible with pelvic examinations.

Professor Saville speaks to the possibilities in places like Papua New Guinea, where the rate of cervical cancer is around 30 in 100,000 (compared with Australia’s six) due to low rates of screening and detection.

“It’s a terrible tragedy in those communities because it strikes women in their 40s and 50s when they are critical to their families. Many of them die without a diagnosis and without adequate treatment,” she says.

“There’s a lot of work to do in those regions. But there’s no way we’re going to do it with our pap program.

 “Self-collection gives us the scalability in lower and middle-income countries to have any hope of meeting those targets.”

Internationally, we have the tools to make the WHO’s elimination strategy a possibility.

But as Professor Saville says, we now need to figure out a way to get such tools to as many communities internationally as possible.

“That is about political will, scaling up and implementation. That’s where we’re working now. It’s an exciting time to be involved.”

The Women’s Health Project is produced by Agenda Media, publisher of Women’s Agenda. 

This project is editorially independent, but made possible thanks to the support of Organon, the recently launched pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. 

The post How cervical cancer became one the world could eliminate appeared first on Women's Agenda.

That’s what researcher and business owner Katie Harris felt she had entered, after experiencing her first hot flush last year and realising she didn’t actually know all that much about this inevitable life stage.

In our latest instalment of the Women’s Health Project, we’re talking about Menopause. And of course, menopause is not a secret world. It’s actually THE world.  

But for some reason, it’s not so frequently discussed. 

During this latest episode, we ask why. With the goal of playing a part in seeing menopause become a louder and more significant national conversation, so that those experiencing menopause can get the support they need from their families and friends, their employers, and the wider community.

Because while this is an area of women’s health that doesn’t necessarily lack treatment options, it can lack sensitivity. Sensitivity that sees women again feeling sidelined, dismissed and ignored.

Women aged 45 to 49 years had the highest age-specific suicide rate and accounted for the highest proportion of female suicides in 2020, according to ABS Causes of Death Data from 2020. There is no single reason for this and we certainly can’t dismiss the loads women disproportionately take on, particularly around caring responsibilities, that can accumulate around this time and lead many to be more vulnerable.

But as Professor Jayashri Kulkarni (pictured above) says, we also can’t dismiss perimenopausal depression that impacts some women in this age group, a form of depression that she’s spent years investigating and researching.

The founder of the Monash Alfred Psychiatry research centre, Professor Kulkarni wants women to know that help is available.  

“Somehow we’ve managed to overlook these dreadful statistics,” she says.

“If we had a focus on women’s mental health, these sorts of things wouldn’t go under the radar and we’d be able to provide meaningful, tailored treatment for menopausal women to improve outcomes and to prevent some of these terrible stories.”   

Professor Kulkarni highlights how the average age of menopause is 51, but women can experience symptoms in the years leading up to that point. “51 is the end of menopause, it begins in the brain around the age of 42 and 43.

“Everyone focuses on the hot flushers. But that’s not the thing that disturbs the quality of life as much as the mental stage.”

A couple of studies have raised national attention of menopause: with Circle In and the Victorian Women’s Trust sharing research this year finding that almost half of women experiencing menopause consider retiring or taking a break from work, and 76% call for better employer support. As Mary Crooks AO said on the findings: it’s research like this that confirms we’ve reached a “special moment in time” because when we lift the lid on menstruation generally, including menopause, we change both our private and public worlds for the better.

Katie Harris is aiming to do just that. Having experienced her first hot flush while in lockdown in 2020, she says she entered a “secret world” and was surprised to have been taken off guard by menopause.

As the co founder of Zebra Research, she set about researching the issue, conducting a series of interviews with a diverse range of women to learn more about what they had or were experiencing, particularly regarding their work. “I also realized the huge lack of information out there and understanding about menopause. And on the back of that, a whole lot of misinformation.

“I saw this as a public health failure and took it upon myself to go on a mission because all women go through menopause, right? All women, half the population go through menopause. 80% of them will have symptoms. 60% will have mild to moderate symptoms.”

Harris has since gone on to create dedicated resources for workplaces looking to understand how their staff experience menopause and what can be done to support them. She knows that women’s workforce participation levels will struggle to improve if we don’t better support those experiencing menopause, especially with shifting demographic patterns seeing so many women looking to accelerate their careers in their 40s and 50s.

Some workplaces are already responding in more sophisticated ways, including by offering “menopause leave”, as Future Super recently announced in Australia, and as Kellogg’s announced internationally.

Meanwhile, Sydney-based GP Dr Julia Menzies believes there are significant gaps in the understanding of menopause among doctors, as well as lingering concerns regarding treatment options that may see women feeling dismissed when they do approach a GP with their symptoms or concerns.

“People would come to me being quite desperate, and I realized that there was a really huge need out there for more doctors to be informed and trained in how to help women through menopause,” she says.

Dr Menzies wants people to put menopause on their agenda, and to know that there is help available – if they’re not getting anywhere with the first GP or health practitioner they speak to, to do some research and find others that have a better understanding.

We explore all the above and more in the latest episode of the Women’s Health Project.

The special podcast series is created independently by Women’s Agenda and supported by Organon, the recently launched pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. 

If you or someone you know has mental health concerns, you can call Lifeline on 13 11 14, or Beyond Blue on 1300 22 4636.

You can subscribe to the Women’s Health Project via iTunes or Spotify, where you’ll also find recent episodes.

The post The hushed but not-so-secret world of menopause appeared first on Women's Agenda.

But I can picture him: the cartoon character sitting on a couch with his large belly, beer in hand, watching the television and popping up in loungerooms for almost 20 years.

He told Australians to get out and exercise. To eat healthily. He warned Australians about obesity and heart disease.

And he did a great job of doing so.

Just one problem. The message was largely aimed at men, the “normal” men of Australia he was designed to depict.

As Professor Szoeke, a neurologist, professor of Medicine and clinical researcher at the University of Melbourne, outlines in the latest episode of The Women’s Health Project, the key female character in these ads in aerobics gear – who we assume to have been Norm’s partner – would be the one telling him to get up and moving.  

“And so the take-home message from that for a population was that women have to help their men get off the couch,” Professor Szoeke says. But the realities facing women in terms of heart disease, healthy eating and healthy body mass index still required significant attention.

During this latest instalment of the Project, we touch on dementia, heart disease and the impact of social media on women – all big topics which we’ll come back to again – but the ultimate goal is to consider the loads that women take on.

In the case of Norm as well as other public health campaigns, this load is in the role women have long been asked to take on in terms of addressing the health concerns of the men in their lives.

But of course, there are other loads. There is the load of paid work, and shifting demographics and ways of working that have not kept up with changing family patterns and dynamics.

There’s the load of unpaid work that comes with caring for children, older parents, relatives and those with a disability – alongside domestic roles and responsibilities at home.

There’s the mental load, taking on the thinking and organsing for a household, and even things like the research and decision-making that’s needed for sorting out aged care for a loved one.

There’s the load of sexism and violence. For some women, there are the added loads of racism, ageism, and disability, as well as a socio-economic disadvantage and the fear of retiring into poverty.

And of course, there’s the load that comes with a woman having her pain dismissed, her symptoms ignored. Or with quietly having to contend with the physical and emotional pain of miscarriage, of childbirth, of menopause.

Do we know enough about how these loads are impacting women’s health? For one, we went years without a Time Use Survey in Australia, and even the data such a survey can provide is limited.

Professor Szoeke’s book is based on a 30-year project that’s seen hundreds of women in Australia studied from their mid to late lives, giving insights into how we can better promote overall wellness and achieve a longer and healthier life.

The book highlights some of the best insights to have come from this study, as well as other pieces of research, particularly in identifying factors leading to some of the biggest causes of death among women: dementia and heart disease.

Indeed, Professor Szoeke urges more consideration be given to “hearts and brains” when it comes to addressing women’s health, rather than only what she describes as “bikini health” – that is anything covered by a bikini.

“The number one leading cause of death in Australia for women is dementia,” Szoeke says. “The number two leading cause of death is heart disease. Number three leading cause of death is stroke, which is a blood vessel blockage to the brain. So brain and heart are right up there, three leading causes of death. And yet when I say ‘women’s health’ people think other things.”

In 1990, getting this research off the ground was particularly novel. The principal investigator at the time, Professor Lorrain Dennerstein AO, was a psychiatrist who had been getting referrals for women who were considered to be “hysterical” or suffering from “empty nest syndrome”. She worked with the university to set up a new office called the “Office for Gender and Health”. Those things just didn’t exist.

Professor Szoeke notes how additions have been made to the research as women have gotten older, including the impact of caring for grandchildren — another ‘load’ that women often take on.

“We thought the cognition was going to be better in women looking after their grandchildren. And it was! However, if they were looking after their grandchildren five days a week or more, they had worse cognition, then the grandparents who were not allowed to look after their grandchildren because of their cognition.”

Delving into this further, the team found stress-related issues associated with the pressures of caregiving.

Professor Szoeke also highlights how the research shows the “secret” to exercise: just do something, every day. That something is likely to change as you get older, but just keep getting in that 30 minutes or more, every day, will make a huge difference.

Back to Norm. He did a lot of good in addressing things like heart disease in men. And we know that when women are educated on public health, their families and their entire communities ultimately do better.

But we can’t forget her health in the process.

This podcast is independently created by Women’s Agenda and proudly sponsored by Organon, a pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. Women’s Agenda is published by Agenda Media, a 100% female-owned and run media company.

The post These are the ‘loads’ impacting women’s health appeared first on Women's Agenda.

This is the opening snippet of the Women’s Health Project, a new podcast series created by Women’s Agenda, that’s delving into the world of women’s health, exploring why and how issues specific to women have been overlooked and often dismissed in the medical sphere.

Those words are from entrepreneur Shivani Gopal, who explains that it took all of her adult life to receive a diagnosis of endometriosis, despite her frequent and repeated efforts to get answers regarding her pain from medical professionals. The late diagnosis meant it was difficult for her to fall pregnant, and she had to put up with a whole lot of pain, for years and years. Unfortunately, her story isn’t unique, with many women all over the world having similar stories.

“How in the world could you compare your pain to another woman’s pain? We just know that we’re all in pain at some point and because of that, we are taught to just grin and bear it, to be resilient and to just push on,” Gopal continues.

In the first episode of the Women’s Health Project, released today and supported by Organon, Angela Priestley, who is the publisher and co-founder of Women’s Agenda, looks at the historical context of misogyny in healthcare and medical research – and the subsequent gender gap we have today.

The podcast will explore how and why women are so often overlooked in healthcare and medicine, something that was illuminated in the 2021 Australia Talks Survey, which found that 1 in 3 women have had their health concerns dismissed.

“I think the general community member would be surprised to know that many of the fundamentals about what we know about human biology and functioning is based on the 70-kilo white man. That is the default human,” Dr Amy Vassallo, research fellow at the Global Women’s Health program at the George Institute says.

Dr Vassallo says there is an assumption in health research that the 70-kilo white man is “reflective of all people”, and essentially, that’s what much of our health and medical knowledge is based on.

The Women’s Health Project podcast series will cover everything from heart disease, mental health, reproductive and maternal health, chronic illness and physical health issues, looking at how the gender gap in medicine and research has impacted women throughout history. It’ll also dive into some of the more positive developments in the women’s health space in recent years, and why things are (slowly) starting to change for the better.

The series will also explore how particular groups of women, especially women of colour, have been, and continue to be, more likely to be dismissed in the healthcare space. It’s an issue that was illuminated just weeks ago, when the World Health Organisation posthumously honoured Henrietta Lacks, an African American woman whose body was unduly “exploited for science”.

Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer at the age of 31 in 1951 and was buried in an unmarked grave, but she played an integral role in some of modern medicine’s most significant developments. Her cells were collected without her knowledge or consent, and they led to multiple breakthroughs including the development of the polio vaccine, IVF treatment and the cervical cancer vaccine. It was only decades after her death that her family learnt just how vital Lacks’ cells have been to medical research.

Lacks’ story is just one of the many untold stories of women in the realm of health and medicine, but getting to know her name, as well as what happened to her, is significant in understanding women’s health more broadly.

It’s only been recently that we’ve started to come to terms with the gender gap in health but its history goes back a long way — back to Ancient Greece, actually — so let’s take the time to learn more about it so we can improve outcomes for women everywhere.

The first episode of the Women’s Health Project podcast series is out today, you can listen and subscribe on your favourite podcast app.

This podcast is independently created by Women’s Agenda and proudly sponsored by Organon, a pharmaceutical company dedicated to a better and healthier every day for every woman. Women’s Agenda is published by Agenda Media, a 100% female-owned and run media company.

The post How did women’s health get sidelined? Our Women’s Health Project is here to find out appeared first on Women's Agenda.