2022 Annual Report Women's Health
Activities
Online introductory meeting 11.5.2022
We held an online open meeting to launch the special interest group. We shared our interests in women’s health and what a SIG could do. It was agreed that we would have research and learning updates, and a newsletter and that we would curate regular networking and showcasing events, the first of which is planned for January 2022.
SAPC 2022.
We held our first in person conversation to launch the women’s health special interest group. We spoke about why we hope it will be important and valuable to develop this group, reflecting on the historical lack of funding (and consequently research) into women’s health and the (at that time still anticipated) Women’s Health Strategy for England. We spoke about the opportunities and need for primary care focussed knowledge, resources and research, and how we hope that this group will be a collaborative vehicle to support each other and take this forwards.
We shared a bit about our current research and interests, which included perinatal care (physical, continence, emotional and mental health), epidemiology, urinary tract infections, endometriosis and menstrual health, and service delivery, amongst others. In doing so, we reflected on how we define and understand women’s health – ensuring that it reflects all aspects of how and when women experience health and health services and encompasses the whole life course. We spoke about the need to both develop and evaluate health services to support women’s health, including whether these could be resources for general primary care, collected together by need or condition (for example menopause, endometriosis, sexual health) or whether women’s health is supported via community hubs (and what might this mean for primary care skills and for holistic primary care delivery).
Newsletter
November 2022 we produced our first SIG newsletter discussing past and future activity, researcher requests and also shone a spotlight on one of our SIG members Abigail McNiven. This is enclosed as an attachment with this report.
Future activity
SIG Webinar 18th January Menopause research
On Wednesday January the 18th 12-14.00 we will be holding our first Women’s health SIG webinar. The theme for the first webinar will be menopause. We will have presentations from Dr Shoba Dawson, Dr Jo Burgin, Dr Yvette Pyne, Dr Jennifer Maclellan and Dr Sarah Hillman who will be looking at current areas of research into menopause care, including improving diagnosis of the perimenopause, identifying South Asian women’s priorities for menopause care and providing menopause care in under resourced communities
Impact
We are a newly formed group, but already there is evidence of “linking up of institutions” as will happen in our January webinar, we look forward to this becoming research and grant opportunities.
SAPC affiliation
This has helped us greatly to get visibility nationally to get a group representative of many institution in the UK.