Budget 2016: Healthcare service must respond better to the needs of all women
Published: Thursday, September 03, 2015
In a letter this week to the Minister for Health, Dr. Leo Varadkar, TD, the National Women’s Council of Ireland (NWCI) has called for resourcing of initiatives in Budget 2016 for a health care service that responds better to the needs of all women in Ireland.
Investment in Maternity Services
Jacqueline Healy, Women’s Health and Human Rights Officer with NWCI, said,
“Ireland’s maternity services are operating at crisis point and fail to respond adequately to needs of all women in Ireland. To ensure maternity services are safe, women centred and accountable, we will require significant investment in this area in Budget 2016. The drawing up of a National Maternity Strategy is a welcome and long overdue development for reform but we need to ring fence funding now to ensure its implementation.”
“In particular, we need to increase the ratio of midwives to the internationally recognised best practice standard of 1 midwife per 29.5 deliveries. Ireland is currently lagging behind this standard, whereby some maternity facilities have a ratio of 1 midwife per 55 deliveries. Our membership also expressed a clear call for more services available in the community to facilitate choice and continuity of care for women at local level. “
Adapting health services to the specific needs of women and men
She continued,
“NWCI calls on the Minister for Health to invest in making the health services more responsive to the needs of women. Currently the health system takes no account of gender differences in health promotion, diagnosis and treatment despite international evidence that such an approach delivers better health outcomes for women and men. A good example of this is smoking cessation services. Today more women die of lung cancer than breast cancer and nearly one in three women in Ireland smoke. When the services are adapted to the specific needs of women, they are much more effective and have better results, as was highlighted in a recent pilot project of the Irish Cancer Society.”
Jacqueline Healy concluded,
“The Irish government has already made firm commitments to make healthcare policies and services more responsive to the needs of women and men through gender equality reviews. We need to establish and resource a unit within the Department of Health to lead and co-ordinate this review across the full complement of our health services.”
Ends/
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