Queensland commits to improving women and girls' health

Working at The Social Deck is rewarding in many ways, but particularly when you get to play a small part in something that can make a big change.

Last week, during Queensland Women’s Week, the Queensland Government released the Queensland Women and Girls’ Health Strategy 2032, which aims to improve the health and wellbeing of all women and girls across their life course. This includes making significant investment towards improving women’s experience of the healthcare system.

We were fortunate to have the opportunity last year to design and facilitate some of the consultation sessions with key stakeholders, to better understand and help inform priorities for the strategy, against the key focus areas identified by the Queensland Government.

At The Social Deck, many of our staff are women living in Queensland (including me!), so this work felt particularly close to home.

Having access to adequate, safe and appropriate healthcare is a right. But for many women, it can be difficult to find the right sort of care and support. In rural and regional Queensland, for example, this can be a particular issue. So we were excited to see the focus on health equity and the investment in health prevention, responses and care.

When we engaged with stakeholders in the workshops we got an immediate sense of the expertise that exists in the system to understand the inherent challenges for women in Queensland’s healthcare system, particularly those from priority populations.

The following image (which depicts the many ideas people shared in an online whiteboard) shows just how much participants had to share with us about the barriers and enablers that exist.  

We know that many of the challenges that women and girls face in the healthcare system are complex and will take time to overcome. Nevertheless, strategies such as these, and this big investment by the Queensland Government, provide a shared direction that can make a real difference for our communities.

We were thrilled to see the amount of engagement this strategy received, with the Queensland Government receiving more than 12,000 responses to their survey to inform this strategy (the biggest response to a Queensland Government survey in history). This shows just how important this issue is to so many Queenslanders.

We look forward to closely following the implementation of the strategy in the coming years, and working again with stakeholders and community who shaped it.