STATEMENTS ON SIGNIFICANT MATTERS
Ms WITTY (Melbourne) (12:16): I rise today to mark Women's Health Week, and I want to start with a story about a young girl who was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pains. She was 14 years old. The doctors treating her believed she had appendicitis.
The pain was severe. Surgery was being discussed. Everyone was focused on getting her into theatre as quickly as possible, and rightfully so.
Before that happened, an experienced female nurse walked into the room and asked a handful of questions about her menstrual cycle—questions that, as a woman, she knew to ask. They were simple and everyday questions in the life of a woman. Thankfully she asked them, because they changed the direction of her treatment.
The surgery never happened. The diagnosis was different, and a young girl was spared an unnecessary operation because someone took the time to consider a possibility that had been overlooked. I thought about that story during Women's Health Week.
Of course, the doctors were trying to help, and the nurse was trying to help. What the story shows is that understanding women's health can completely change an outcome. It shows how important it is to ask the right questions and how easily women's experiences can be missed when they are not part of the conversation from the beginning.
That is just one reason Women's Health Week remains so important. It gives us an opportunity to talk about issues that affect millions of women but are still often treated as uncomfortable, private or secondary compared with other health discussions—or, even worse, they are unknown or unconsidered. Many women can recall a time when they felt something was wrong but struggled to get answers from a doctor or medical professional.
Some spent years seeking a diagnosis for endometriosis. Others go through perimenopause without understanding why their bodies suddenly feel different, from stiff joints to night sweats. I even found myself with symptoms that I didn't know were part of perimenopause until years and years later.
Some present with symptoms of heart disease and discover that what they have experienced did not fit the way many people expect those symptoms to appear. Although the circumstances vary, there is a common thread running through many of these stories. Too often, women find themselves having to return for another appointment, explain their symptoms again or push harder to be taken seriously.
As the member for Melbourne, I hear about these experiences regularly from women across my electorate. One conversation that has stayed with me was from a woman seeking a routine prescription for her contraceptive pill. She had taken time out of her day to attend an appointment, she paid for the consultation and expected to leave with her prescription.
The need to have continual appointments is one thing when asking for the pill, and it's bad enough, but, instead, the conversation took a very different turn. The doctor questioned her decision and told her he would not prescribe the medication without the involvement of her husband. Yes, you heard it: the doctor insisted her husband was with her before she received the pill.
Unbelievable. Thankfully, she challenged the decision, she stood her ground, and she ultimately received the prescription she had attended the appointment to obtain. But what stayed with her afterwards was not her prescription itself, it was the thought that many other women would have found themselves in the same situation and simply accepted the answer that was given and left without the help they needed.
Access to health care should not depend on whether a woman is prepared to argue for it, nor should routine health care become more difficult because someone else's personal views have entered the consultation room. The examples I have mentioned today are very different, but they both point to a broader issue: women's health has often been treated as something separate from mainstream healthcare policy when, in reality, it touches every stage of a woman's life.
It affects young girls navigating adolescence; it affects women choosing contraception, starting families or deciding not to; it affects women living with chronic pain; and it affects women balancing work, caring responsibilities and the physical changes that come with ageing. When those experiences are overlooked, the consequences can be significant. When they are recognised and understood, health care becomes more responsive and more effective.
That is why I am proud of the work the Albanese Labor government has undertaken in this area. The government's women's health package represents a record investment of almost $800 million in women's health. More than one million women have already benefited from cheaper medicines through these reforms, saving over $150 million on prescriptions for contraceptives, menopause treatments and endometriosis medications.
For decades, women were told that additions to the PBS in these areas could wait. Under Labor, new contraceptive pills have been added to the PBS for the first time in more than 30 years, while new menopause hormone therapies have been listed for the first time in more than 20 years. The government has also opened 33 endometriosis and pelvic pain clinics around Australia.
Those clinics have already supported more than 10,000 women and girls and delivered over 28,000 services, helping women access specialist care closer to home and reducing some of the delays that have frustrated patients for years. More than 137,000 women have now accessed a Medicare funded menopause health assessment, and reforms to Medicare have made it cheaper and easier to access long-acting contraceptives, such as IUDs and implants.
Those changes are expected to assist around 300,000 women each year. These reforms do not appear out of thin air. They reflect years of women sharing their experiences and a government that was prepared to recognise there were gaps in the system.
They also reflect the simple reality that better healthcare policy starts with understanding how people experience the healthcare system in practice. There's still more work ahead. There are women waiting too long for diagnoses, there are women putting off appointments because of cost, and there are women dealing with symptoms in silence because they are unsure whether what they are experiencing is normal or because they are worried they will not be taken seriously.
That is why conversations during Women's Health Week are so valuable. The more openly we talk about menstruation health, endometriosis, menopause, contraception and cardiovascular disease, the more likely it is that people recognise symptoms earlier and seek support sooner. Those conversations also help break down the stigma that has surrounded many of these issues for far too long.
I come back to the story of the 14-year-old girl in hospital. The outcome changed because someone paused, asked a different set of questions and considered an aspect of her health that had not been fully explored. That is a lesson that reaches far beyond a single hospital room.
Women's Health Week encourages us to pay attention to experiences that have often been overlooked, to listen carefully when women describe what they are going through and to keep building a healthcare system that responds to these experiences. I'm proud to be part of a government taking real action on women's health, and I will always be a voice for women and girls in this place.