Women’s Health Outcomes

Baroness Bryan of Partick Excerpts

Thursday 8th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Bryan of Partick (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Baroness, Lady Jenkin, for enabling this important debate. Unlike other health comparisons, the gap between men’s and women’s health is wider in some developed countries than in some less-developed ones. The UK ranks 87th in the world for men’s health, while it ranks 125th for women’s health—38 places lower. This gap puts it 12th in the international list of women’s health inequality. How can this be?

One of the reasons appears to be the misdiagnosis of women’s symptoms, which I will come to later. A second reason is that women are more likely to live in poverty than men. Whether as single parents, unemployed, on low pay, disabled or as pensioners, women are likely to be poorer than their male counterparts.

Not all inequalities in health relate to gender. Better-off women can expect 20 additional years of healthy life than those who are worse off. Even before the pandemic, progress on healthy life expectancy had stalled and begun to go backwards. The latest figures show that less than a third of women are still in work by the time they reach retirement age. For many, this is not through choice but because they cannot find work or are actually too ill to work. We are condemning many of these women to spend the remainder of their lives in poverty.

As we have heard from several speakers, women have to shout louder to get their concerns listened to. Some of the women who have had to shout the loudest are those affected by mesh implants. The independent review chaired by the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, produced its report First Do No Harm one year ago today. It found that women describing their excruciating chronic pain were dismissed as imagining it or told it was their “time of life”. The report argued that anything and everything that women suffer is perceived as a natural precursor to, part of or a post-symptomatic phase of the menopause. What do the Government intend to do to prevent so many women spending their later years in ill health and poverty? When can we expect the establishment of a redress agency, as proposed in First Do No Harm?