In the health system of our country there are and persist difficulties that complicate women’s effective access to health care, which results in them experiencing more complex health-disease processes than in the case of men.
Keeping this in mind is extremely important when developing health plans for citizens. That is why, in order to demonstrate that proposing a new health reform that only seeks increase access to more health benefits, it is insufficient for this access to be equitable with respect to treatment for women and men.
According to the study “Women’s access to health care: gaps that the future health reform in Chile must resolve”
there is a series of very profound inequities in serious diseases, such as stroke, obesity, depression, musculoskeletal pain, breast cancer, among others.
The study presented yesterday afternoon through a Webinar, in turn, showed how the role of the female caregiver is invisible, stereotyped and unpaid, in a context of multi-role and extensive physical and emotional exhaustion.
In this sense, women present almost twice as much burden as men: there are 66.8% of caregivers versus 33.2% of caregivers. In addition, in Chilean women the burden of disease is greater than in Chilean men. The greatest cause of years of healthy life lost in women is associated with neuropsychiatric conditions (25.9%), digestive (17.9%), cardiovascular (10.8%) and musculoskeletal (6.5%) diseases.
woman with stroke In the country, cerebrovascular attacks (CVA) are considered “a disease of men”, because the number of women who suffer from it is less, however -according to the study-, cerebral thrombosis is on the rise in women with a rise that moves from 1.7% to 3.2% and, although it is indicated that the difference is not significant, what is serious is that,when it occurs in women, it is more lethal
. This condition in the female gender is related to less specific – and less well-known – symptoms, therefore, they have late diagnoses and less access to timely treatment. Additionally, greater complications and worse prognosis in surviving women, in fact, women have 60% less likely to regain their independence after such an accident
and experience low access to rehabilitation (46%).
“When you have a stroke and you go to the doctor, they look at your symptoms and tell you that it’s nothing, that you’re just stressed, that you have to go for a walk, sleep better. Lack of empathy and more preparation of staff. There are people in health who work with love, who treat well, and people who don’t. They need to believe us”, commented the president of the Friends of Hope group, Mónica Acevedo, which is dedicated to accompanying people who have suffered strokes and have already been discharged.
Acevedo added that an unfortunately common situation is that you go to the doctor with stroke symptoms and they send you to a psychiatrist. “They don’t do the exams, they need to look at us as equals. All the studies have to be done to the man because they see him as a supplier, so they review him in his entirety”.
For those caring for a survivor, they typically spend 6.3 hours a day on informal, emotional, physical, and supervisory care. The caregiver’s health is lower than the general population and they present sleep disturbances, physical and psychological stress and, even with a greater burden of care, depression and anxiety increase.
Musculoskeletal diseases According to the National Health Survey, 42.8% of women have pain symptoms at an intensity greater than or equal to four
on a scale of 1 to 10, in contrast to 25.2% in men. In the female gender, pain in the knee (22%), lower back (from 16.3% to 22.1%) and shoulder (11.1%) stands out more frequently. Chronic pain strongly impacts professional life. A 44.2% of female workers live with chronic pain in Chile
and 60.7% have medical licenses associated with this type of ailment, in comparison, in the opposite gender this percentage is reduced to 39.3%. Despite the differences in figures, there are gender biases in the medical treatment of pain: long waits to get diagnoses, less access to treatments and/or less effective ones,
increased use of antidepressants and increased referrals to mental health professionals. “Work with a gender perspective should come first. Especially in health sciences careers, today we do the MEA culpa
because the concept of gender is not incorporated into the study, then, these people who did not have gender courses during their careers, then do not learn them when they practice from work”, explained the midwife, Master in Education in Health Sciences, assistant professor of the Department of Health Promotion of Women and Newborns, of the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Chile, Camila Rojas.
Obesity
In Chile, both morbid obesity and obesity are higher in women than in men (4.7% versus 1.7%, and 33.7% versus 28.6%, respectively). According to Atalah, low socioeconomic status in men is not related to obesity, but it is in women.
According to the study, professional bias is usually very serious for women, since a multidisciplinary strategy is not always developed to treat obesity. “There is still a need to demystify access to therapies that can help reduce weight in women, and the suffering of other pathologies with a high burden of disease in them and their offspring,” the report specifies.
The study concludes at this point that women have access to diets of poor nutritional quality, live in poverty or are in charge of single-parent households in their struggle to lose weight, and that there is still little data on those contexts.
Depression
Finally, mental health problems constitute the main source of disease burden in Chile. The incidence of depressive disorders is higher in women, presenting twice the risk of major depression. In fact, around 30% of pregnant women suffer from symptoms of depression and/or anxiety.
- This problem is intergenerational: during 2019, the Ministry of Health evidenced a high prevalence of depressive symptoms in the population aged 65 and over, with women being the most affected (16.9% versus 4.1% in men).
-You can read the study carried out by Camila Rojas-Cáceres, María Begoña Carroza Escobar, Rony Lenz-Alcayaga, Daniela Paredes-Fernández, from the Universidad de Chile and Universidad Andrés Bello in conjunction with Medtronic, by doing
click here.
