Women’s Health is Everyone’s Business

Empowerment and health are intricately connected and one of the goals of our discipline is to empower individuals and communities to have a voice and to care for themselves. For women in particular, empowerment through good health enables women to reach their full potential, to manage their own lives, and to influence key decisions that shape their lives and families. Empowering women through good health requires equitable access to healthcare, and new preventive healthcare provisions outlined in the Affordable Care Act demonstrate that women’s health is everyone’s business.

The Affordable Care Act calls for important women’s preventive healthcare including mammograms, screenings for cervical cancer, and prenatal care to be offered at no cost to the patient. Notably, the Affordable Care Act also addresses the unique health needs of women throughout their lifespan in eight critical areas:

• Well-woman visits
• Screening for gestational diabetes
• Human papillomavirus testing
• Counseling for sexually transmitted infections
• Counseling and screening for HIV
• Contraceptive methods and counseling
• Breastfeeding support, supplies, and counseling
• Screening and counseling for interpersonal and domestic violence

These guidelines, developed by the Institute of Medicine and supported by the U.S. Health Resources and Services Administration, will give women the benefits of comprehensive preventive services without the burden of co-payments, co-insurance, or deductibles starting in August 2012.

Recognition of the importance of women’s health is cresting. In April, the fifth Colloquium of University Presidents, meeting here at the University of Pennsylvania and hosted by President Amy Gutmann, addressed what universities and the United Nations can do to empower women to change the world.

“Women have the potential to be the world’s most powerful catalysts for change,” the group emphasized, and advocated that the United Nations consider women’s health a matter of global importance by stimulating “innovative programs for vulnerable women and girls . . . [working] to end violence, improve universal access to healthcare and education, eliminate gendered poverty, and improve employment opportunities of women.”

With the prominence of the health of girls and women in the Affordable Care Act, the U.S. is already engaged in creating healthier and more productive families, communities, and societies because the health of the female population is rightfully a priority.

Universities, particularly schools of nursing in our education of healthcare professionals, have a vital role in ensuring that women are well aware of their rights for healthcare, that we join women in developing a strong voice to ensure they have these rights, and that they are exercising the best practices to keep themselves healthy. There is perhaps no more important ingredient to empowerment than good health.

Safe Womanhood

Women are half of the human race. By empowering them through health and educational opportunities, we increase their personal potential to contribute to the economic, political, and social advancement of societies. What society would not benefit from such contributions?  Nurses, the largest healthcare workforce in the world, see women intimately as patients, as pregnant women, as mothers caring for their children, as managers of health, and as daughters caring for their extended families. Therefore, nurses have the knowledge, the power, the voice, and the expertise to work toward safe womanhood and to advocate for women’s health, for human rights, and for having options in life.

Women must be equal partners with equal voice to have an impact on decision-making, policy-making, and development. The marginalization and disempowerment of women hinders them from their rights as human beings to reach their full potential to flourish and effectively contribute to their societies.

At the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing, we have established a Center for Global Women’s Health. The Center will contribute to global research in women’s health scholarship, education, practice, and leadership using an equitable and human justice framework.

The opening of the Center corresponds with the United Nations’ initiatives for the empowerment of women globally and with national attention to women’s health from President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.  They have made girls and women central in U.S. global health programs.
 
Penn Nursing Professor Marilyn Sommers, PhD, RN, FAAN, is director of our Center for Global Women’s Health. Her research focuses on trauma, particularly injuries from rape, sexual assault, and domestic abuse. Last fall, she won the Inaugural Writing Award for Excellence in Research from the Journal of Forensic Nursing for her article “Health Disparities in the Forensic Sexual Assault Examination Related to Skin Color.” Dr. Sommers has conducted path-breaking research finding that injuries are more detectable on lighter skinned women than on darker skinned women, irrespective of race, using current exams for sexual assault injury.
 
With such innovative research, the Center for Global Women’s Health will chart new directions in the domains of safety from violence and harm, equity, empowerment, advocacy, health promotion, and disease prevention. The ultimate goal is to attain safe womanhood, which provides the context and the impetus for healthier and safer families and societies. In short, making women safe and healthy makes the world safe and healthy.