A Woman Should Not Be Treated As a Small Man
April 3, 2024 | Leadership, Women in healthcare
What should the future of women’s healthcare look like? Two renowned physicians say it involves a multidisciplinary, holistic approach, where a group of different specialists work together to provide a lifetime course of holistic primary and specialty care.
Career choices are driven by many factors. In medicine, doctors are often drawn to a particular specialty following a personal experience. That is the case with Dr. Sarah Jarvis, MBE, General Practitioner, and resident doctor on BBC Radio 2.
“I decided at the age of seven or eight that I wanted to be a GP—not a doctor, but a GP!” Jarvis says, an early career decision based on her interaction with the family physician who came to the house to treat her father. “I was absolutely overawed by this almost mythical figure who came and made my daddy better. He was somebody who genuinely made a difference,” she recalls.
The mythical GP also gave the fascinated 8-year-old a needle and syringe to “play with” afterwards, says Jarvis, acknowledging that house calls and offering syringes as playthings are both unthinkable today. “I started injecting my teddy bear with [the soft drink] Ribena, and I kept the needle very carefully in a cork.” And from then on, I’ve never wavered. I went all the way through Cambridge and Oxford always wanting to be a GP” — though she kept her aspirations under her hat since the feeling was that at Cambridge and Oxford “we train professors!”
The episode’s other renowned guest, Dr. Bharati Shivalkar, Senior Medical Director for Rare Cardiology at Pfizer and Practicing Consultant Cardiologist at Delta Hospital in Brussels, Belgium, says she settled on a career in medicine somewhat later—at about age 11.
Both physicians agree that one of the (many) gaps in women’s healthcare today is around communication, and creating a safe pathway for open, honest dialog between doctors and patients.
“Communication skills are crucial,” says Jarvis. “They are not ‘soft skills.’ If I have 2 patients come to me, they may have very different priorities depending on what else is going on in their lives. If I don’t know that, and respect that, then they are much less likely to get the treatment that A), they need, and B), are likely to stick with.”
The benefits are many: fewer complications and return visits means a lightened physician workload (and hopefully reduced burnout). Helping women feel better makes their life better, and that of their families. And since many patients are of working age, it will “have a socioeconomic impact. It [has] a ripple effect on communities,” Jarvis says.
There are some exciting advances in women’s health, adds Shivalkar, including “strong movements in certain domains to create equitable, women-centered care involving a multitude of stakeholders.” The future of women’s health, both physicians believe, is a model where different specialists look at women’s issues and work together to provide a lifetime course of care that includes but extends beyond sexual and reproductive health. It’s important to understand that “many sex-specific and sex-related health issues” for example “may eventually cause cardiovascular disease, which takes a huge toll not only on the individual but society at large,” Shivalkar says.
At The World Economic Forum in Davos this year, “the importance of redesigning healthcare for women with women in mind and addressing the healthcare gap” was emphasized, says Shivalkar, largely because it is finally being recognized that it’s “going to create huge societal economic benefits. There’s talk about creating a trillion-dollar business or generating trillion-dollar businesses through improving women’s health. And recently, there’s also been more cultural investments in women’s health research.
“When you put it in terms of economics,” Shivalkar says, “you get a lot more attention.”
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