7. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: Women’s Health

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:46 pm on 5 July 2022.

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Photo of Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Baroness Mair Eluned Morgan Labour 5:46, 5 July 2022

Thanks very much. I think it's really important to make it absolutely clear there's no contradiction in the fact that we have already started to do work in the gynaecological space. What we're doing here is to expand beyond that, and, certainly, this was something that was drawn to my attention very early on after I was appointed, and I just wasn't aware of it, the fact that heart disease is a bigger killer in women than breast cancer.

There's all of these things, and you think, 'Hang on, one in 10 women are also suffering from endometriosis. Where's the funding to go along with that? Would that be the case if it were a traditional men's area?' So, I don't think there's a contradiction here. What I'm making absolutely clear is, when we had the women's health implementation group—. So, this is the point—you're saying, 'Why haven't you got on with it?' The point is that we had got on with it; we were doing things under the women's health implementation group. This is taking a step back from it and really looking at it, the whole system, from a gender perspective. And you'll see a list in the annex, and the poor officials who work for me are getting fed up with me saying, 'I've found another one; I've found another one. This is another area where we haven't looked at the gender aspect of this', and certainly the list in the annex gives you an understanding of how many conditions there are where women are affected differently, and therefore GPs may miss the symptoms because they present differently. So, it's that kind of thing, and then there'll be implications for the training of the workforce and all of these kinds of things, so we just have to bear all of those things in mind.

In terms of resources, this is a plan that's going to be owned by the health boards. They're going to have to meet it from within their resources. The idea is that they take a gender-focused approach to what they're doing already. But what I can tell you is that, actually, in developing the plan itself, we have put aside £160,000 of additional resource and we have seconded to the NHS Wales collaborative somebody who is involved in developing plans elsewhere, working now with the chief nursing officer to help build this plan, so we've got somebody who's kind of been through this before to help us and to make sure that we land in the right place.