IHSI Diversity Committee Monthly Resources
Each month, the IHSI Diversity Committee shares resources and learning opportunities with the rest of IHSI staff. Curating and sharing these resources allow us to educate ourselves on various topics related to diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice. As an institute devoted to promoting all forms of health, we want to share these resources more broadly with our campus and community stakeholders. We hope that you will find them as useful as we have.
Women's history month spotlight: Women's health
This month, Bridget Melton, IHSI Director of Strategic Initiatives and Communications, shared resources to help us better understand and improve women's health through research, in honor of Women's History Month and International Women's Day (March 8).
A new article published in Nature, "Uncharted: understanding women's health across the body," is a great framework for this conversation. It discusses how not only do women need to be included in studies, but that the disaggregation of data by sex and gender is needed - and often overlooked - to start to make meaningful improvements. Here's a great example of how this can lead to life-saving changes in treatment, cited in the article:
"In 2014, as part of an effort to address the disparities in treatment of heart disease, researchers conducted a meta-analysis of more than 68,000 individuals and found that compared with men, women were 48% more likely to die in hospital after a heart attack.
To improve outcomes for women, researchers at the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio implemented a standard four-step protocol. This involved immediately sending anyone who arrived with certain heart attack symptoms to a specialized lab for the insertion of a balloon catheter.
When they analysed five years of data after they implemented the protocol, researchers reported that there were no significant differences in hospital deaths or rates of serious adverse events between men and women. Women’s chances of dying in hospital after certain kinds of heart attack decreased by more than half."
The disaggregation of data is helpful not only for sex and gender-based data, but for all kinds of populations in order to better understand the drivers of disparities and to develop more effective interventions. This story, "Unpacking the data to tell truer stories about ourselves," draws attention to how this has been a particularly effective strategy when looking at the Asian, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander community.
There is no shortage of other ways we can continue working to improve women's health, including through bias training, increased cultural competence, greater understanding and management of pain, and much more. Here are a couple of our affiliates working directly on women's health issues - please check out their research and advocacy and continue supporting this important work!