Advocacy

Strategic direction 1: Promote gender equality within a health context

The Women’s recognises that sex and gender affects a person’s health and healthcare, and is committed to promoting gender equity.

This includes:

• advocating for greater representation of women in leadership and STEM;
• advancing gender equity within Victorian health services, in governance settings, policy development, workforce, service design and delivery, and
• taking an intersectional approach to gender equity. It includes advocating for gender sensitive health services and sex and gender equity in medical research.

We are also committed to promoting and improving the responses of health services to violence against women as a gendered health issue.

Strategic direction 2: Promote health equity for vulnerable women and their children

The Women’s is working hard to provide healthcare that addresses and removes structural barriers and discriminatory practices that impact health outcomes for women and newborns experiencing disadvantage. We acknowledge there is much work for us to do in this area.

We recognise some groups of women are healthier than others, not because of personal choice, but because of social, economic and environmental circumstances over the course of their lives, including structural, funding and health system barriers that prevent or make it difficult to access care.

We prioritise our systems advocacy to acknowledge the social determinants of health, redress disadvantage and discrimination that affects women’s health; and increase access for women to high quality, inclusive and culturally safe public healthcare.

We are focused on improving health outcomes for:

• Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women
• women with lived experience of disability and
• women who are vulnerable or at-risk.

We are concerned about the issue of short-term fixed funding for critical health services and programs, which can de-stabilise services and amplify existing inequities.

Strategic direction 3: Advance complex and critical areas of women’s health

There remain a number of stigmatised areas of women’s reproductive health where barriers and service gaps affect women’s capacity to access responsive and comprehensive healthcare. This is particularly true for areas such as women’s choice and ability to exercise their reproductive rights and safe and timely access to contraception and abortion services.

We advocate to improve knowledge and increase public awareness and understanding and for improved resources and access to:

• contraception
• abortion services
• public fertility services.

We also advocate for improved treatment and outcomes for people with:

• endometriosis
• menstrual issues 
• persistent pelvic pain
• menopause.

We advocate for support and education on fertility awareness as well as increased access to affordable fertility services including fertility preservation, infertility prevention, detection and management.

Strategic direction 4: Promote investment in our workforce, services and infrastructure

Ensuring the Women’s has a highly skilled, trained and diverse neonatal and women’s health workforce and the infrastructure and capital resources to meet current and future service demand, and provide safe and effective care, is a critical priority for us.

We also seek to improve opportunities for investment in women’s health services across the whole health system.

We direct our advocacy to government, funders, our precinct partners and the wider health sector to increase Victoria’s workforce capacity to better meet the needs of the state’s women and babies.

We prioritise making our physical environment culturally safe, inclusive and accessible for our patients and workforce, and ensure spaces are developed and designed with a gendered lens.