Last year we published a comprehensive report in The Lancet that had exactly that title: ‘Women and health – the key to sustainable development’ that through very, very comprehensive research shows how important women, healthy women, empowered women, enabled women are for sustainable development. The focus of the report and my talk tomorrow is not only on women’s health but on women and health, meaning that women are not only the bearers of health problems, they are also the providers of healthcare in the community, in the household and they are a majority in the health workforce. So how to produce some synergy between healthy women and women who are better prepared, better positioned, to provide good healthcare is the focus of the report and a key ingredient for sustainable development.
What are the next steps for women’s cancer care?
There are a number of recommendations that I will make in my presentation. One group of recommendations is related to valuing women and that basically means that all universal health coverage programmes that are now promoted by the Sustainable Development Goals and are being implemented by countries need to put special emphasis on women’s health and women’s rights to healthcare. I also talk about counting women, the importance of counting women. Very often health statistics don’t segregate data by sex so nobody can have a true picture of the burden of some cancers and non-communicable diseases that women share with men, how they particularly affect women because of biological or social factors like gender discrimination and other factors. I also talk about compensating women, how to bridge the wage gap between women and men who play the same roles but women are consistently paid less, and how to make visible the invisible subsidy that women give to the health system by providing care that is not recognised at home and in the community. I also talk about how to make societies and governments accountable to women, how to track progress towards those goals. I think that all those recommendations are very relevant for cancer care.
