Save a Woman’s Life, Save a Family
A recent Lancet study found that women contribute approximately 3 trillion dollars to the field of global health care and nearly half of this labor is unpaid, unrecognized, and unaccounted for. The study goes on to describe how, in almost every culture, women are responsible for providing general health care to members of their family. Women are not only responsible for general health within their own families but are also assuming community-based and globally-based health responsibilities. Dr. Felicia Knaul, one of the authors of the Lancet study, stated that over 50% of graduate students studying to become physicians are female. Additionally, in 2009, over 75% of health and welfare graduates in the European Union were women.
A recent example of the unequal health burden that women face is the Ebola outbreak in West Africa. Women accounted for a larger proportion of the fatalities than did men. This is partly because in many West African nations it is traditionally the women’s job to be the primary care-giver. The traditional roles they carried out as family healer, main provider of funerary rites, and care-giver left them vulnerable to infection. Additionally, women are more likely to be nurses and hospital workers whose daily job duties, without the right protective equipment and infection control training, put them at risk of infection.
WWRGHD
As a Global Health Development Company that is both owned by a woman and dedicated to locally-based, effective, and sustainable heath solutions, we absolutely believe that gender equality and guaranteeing women’s rights play a key part in the improvement of global health and the attainment of global health goals. We relentlessly seek to ensure effective health service delivery. We put effective and sustainable procedures in place to deliver quality health care according to international standards and the latest medical and scientific data. This approach improves the effectiveness of aid programs that address the unfair burden disease places on women. We re-engineer and adjust aid-funded programs to strengthen a beneficiary country’s health system and disease control and prevention programs to monitor and meet the unique health needs of the women in that country
Women are looked to as the caregiver in many societies. It is our job as a member of the global health family to ensure that women living in developing countries are supported by an effective local health system that can provide them with the health knowledge they need via educational disease prevention programs to keep themselves and their families healthy. Additionally, an effective local health system would be able, in times of need, to provide women with the tools they require to get their family to a treatment center that can provide specialized care. Save a woman’s life, save a family.
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Attribution: Health Builders
