Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Medical misogyny is not a term that I learnt in any medical textbook. It's a phrase that I became familiar with only once I became a parliamentarian. It refers to the inbuilt bias against women that is baked into the medical system. I was aware of it when I practised, particularly in women presenting with cardiac symptoms—who often presented late or were misdiagnosed and had poor outcomes—but I probably didn't fully appreciate it.

Medical misogyny occurs for lots of reasons. It refers to the denialism that women face when they present with their symptoms, which may not necessarily be textbook. It refers to the silencing and shaming of women. It refers to a lack of appreciation for how women's health issues are often related to hormonal and reproductive phases of their life. And it also refers to, frankly, the poor representation of all types of women—ethnicities, shapes and sizes—in clinical trials—those same clinical trials that lead to the registration of drugs, which then are dispersed to millions of women in the market. And so is it any wonder that some women simply don't respond to those drugs, as described in actual journal articles? It starts at the root.

This government has taken a strong focus on women's health. We're really running the ruler over our women's health approach in Medicare. One of the first measures we introduced was the Women's Health Summit. That was led by assistant minister Ged Carney in March of this year. It was very much informed by a survey of 3,000 women around Australia, which demonstrated that two out of three women experienced a type of medical bias in the health system—something we now call 'medical misogyny'. Perhaps the archetypal condition is endometriosis. Endometriosis affects about a million Australian women. That's a lot of women. It affects one in nine women, and it takes, on average, seven years to diagnose. Seven years! That's extraordinary. Cancer doesn't take seven years to diagnose, and yet endometriosis takes seven years. And the symptoms are not particularly hard; they're basically symptoms that occur with a woman's cycle. They're cyclical symptoms—whether they be tummy bloating, pain in the abdomen or in the pelvis, diarrhoea or constipation, painful sex—and yet it is very poorly recognised in the health system.

This is why we have funded 20 endometriosis clinics and pelvic pain clinics right around the country. I had the privilege of visiting one. I went to the EACH endometriosis and pelvic pain clinic in Ringwood East, a very long way from my electorate. I was really pleased to visit the clinic because what I saw there was multidisciplinary care. It was GP led, but supported by dietitians, physios, occupational therapists. They even had an ultrasound on site. This clinic was overflowing with patients. Why? Because people from far and wide are attending this clinic. I learnt that patients from as far away as Traralgon would turn up, often with wads of files, because they had been going from pillar to post to try and get good advice. They would come to the EACH clinic and it was such a relief.

Endometriosis is a chronic condition; there is no cure for it. This clinic offers a one-hour consultation that is bulk-billed. It is free. It is walk-in. The public waiting list to see a specialist for chronic pelvic pain is actually between one to four years. One to four years to just get in through the front door! This clinic has shortened that waiting time to 14 days. And I've never met such a dedicated, impassioned group of healthcare workers, who were simply asking us for more space. What a good problem to have! They had simply run out of space, and as a result the GP was working from home, seeing patients, and she wanted an extra consulting room. They had also planned on partnering with a hospital in the area, Eastern Health Box Hill, in order to have consultant gynaecologists also attend with their doctors.

On that note, we have increased the Medicare rebate for women to see consultant gynaecologists in order to make it much more affordable and accessible for them to do so. Again, this is a way that we are ironing out the biases in the system.

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