Some good news. On 19 August the Senate agreed to establish a Select Committee on Women’s Health, on a motion moved by Senator Marielle Smith, who will chair it.
We want to start by thanking her. Committees like this do not appear by themselves. This one exists because a senator kept raising women’s health, year after year, and was willing to draw on her own experience to make the case. That takes something, and we’re grateful for it.
The Committee will look at postpartum care, women’s pain and experiences of medical misogyny, fertility and assisted reproduction, and the regulation of medical devices used in women’s healthcare. It will hold hearings around the country.
WHISE will be making a submission, and we’ll be doing everything we can to help women across our region make theirs.
Why we think this one can go well
When Victoria ran its Inquiry into Women’s Pain, more than 13,000 women, girls, gender diverse people, carers and clinicians took the time to respond. Nobody predicted that number.
That response is the thing worth holding onto. Not just what women said, but that they said it — in volume, in detail, and often about experiences they had carried privately for years. Women were ready. They had the analysis. What had been missing was somewhere to put it.
That’s the opportunity in front of this Committee, and it’s a real one.
Three things we’ll be asking for
Count prevention and recovery, not just treatment.
Most of what shapes a woman’s postpartum year happens outside a clinic. Whether she knows what’s normal and what isn’t. Whether she has other women around her. Whether she feels entitled to ask for help. Whether someone in her community told her, early, that the pain she was having was worth getting looked at.
Those are protective factors, and they are built — by community health promotion, by peer networks, by services that show up in neighbourhoods rather than waiting to be found. The same is true at the other end: recovery keeps going long after the clinical episode closes.
This is where place-based services do most of our work, and it’s where some of the biggest gains are available. We’ll be asking the Committee to keep it firmly in view.
Let women tell it whole.
Women rarely experience their health in the categories our systems use. Pain, anxiety, feeding, sleep and what’s happening at home tend to arrive tangled together, and women describe them that way when they’re asked openly.
Pregnancy and the first year after birth are also a period of elevated family violence risk. A Committee that lets women tell the whole story will hear connections that separated streams of inquiry would miss.
Look at the growth corridors.
Our region runs from Port Phillip out to Cardinia — ten local government areas, and some of the most linguistically diverse communities in the country. The outer parts are among the fastest growing places in Australia.
Women there navigate distance, transport and stretched services in much the same way regional families do, but sit outside programs designed for regional areas because they’re technically metropolitan. Many are also newly arrived, on temporary visas, or working in more than one language.
They are also, it should be said, extraordinarily resourceful — running mothers’ groups in four languages, sharing childcare, getting each other to appointments. That capability is worth building on, and it will be visible to the Committee if hearings are held where those women actually live. We’d love to help make that happen.
How to be part of it
Submission dates haven’t been set yet. Once the Committee’s page goes live on the Parliament of Australia website, we’ll share the details here and through our networks.
In the meantime, if you work in health, community services or local government in the south east, start thinking now about what you’d want the Senate to know. And if you’re a woman in our region with something to say about your own care, we’d like to help you say it — including in your own language, and with support if the telling is hard.
For more information please contact WHISE whise@whise.org.au
