We recently co-authored an academic paper as part of a special collection on HIV and women’s health. This summarised the historic exclusion of women in HIV research and methods to address this, from the perspectives of community, medical, and advocacy stakeholders. Importantly, several authors were women living with HIV and the special collection it was […]
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Leadership and Gender Pay Gaps in Medicine by Jane Dacre
Why am I interested in women in leadership? Well, I grew up with three brothers, and no sisters. From an early age, it was clear to me that boys were allowed privileges that were not open to girls, and that the societal expectations on me were different from those on my brothers. I was encouraged […]
Breaking the bias: Celebrating International Women’s Day by By Helen Bevan, NHS Horizons team, England and Prerana Issar, former Chief People Officer of the NHS in England, in a personal capacity
International Women’s Day, 8th March 2022, is an opportunity to celebrate the role that women play at work and in the world. In healthcare systems around the world, women make up around 80% of the workforce. Women are doing 80% of the work, but not 80% of the decision making: women are not represented in […]
Learning from the past and paying it forward by Nuthana Prathivadi Bhayankaram
Happy International Women’s Day 2022! This year’s theme is #BreaktheBias, and it feels quite sad that in 2022 there remains a large amount of conscious and unconscious gender bias in medicine and society in general. Just a few days ago a patient’s parent kept asking me when the Doctor was coming to see her child, […]
#BreaktheBias is not easy by Evonne Hunt
I am writing this blog in celebration of International Women’s Day (Wednesday 8 March 2022) as I want to share some of mine and my female colleagues’ experiences. Not only as women who have experienced bias, stereotypes and discrimination but as women who actively work together for change. Writing about #BreakTheBias is not easy because, […]
IWD 2022: Beating a better path for the medical women that follow me by Chloe Orkin
I am the 80th President of the Medical Women’s Federation (MWF), the organisation that has been the voice of medical women in the UK for 105 years. The organisation’s history is inextricably intertwined with the history of suffrage in the UK. MWF has a proud and consistent history of effective activism, feminism, and mentorship. On […]
Trans allyship in healthcare – what ‘good’ looks like by William Ballard, Tom Gardiner and Rob Cullum
This LGBTQ+ history month, three LGBTQ+ healthcare professionals give you the lowdown on what it means to be a good trans ally in healthcare If there’s one thing you can guarantee about a career in healthcare, it’s that you will meet people of every ethnicity, every sexuality, every age and gender. However, healthcare professionals rarely […]
Injustice in Healthcare by Chandraa Bhattacharya
The COVID-19 pandemic has shone a bright light on the seriousness of health inequalities within England, exacerbating the significant discrepancy between healthy life expectancy that is known to exist between the least and most deprived areas of England. A national approach to reduce health inequalities and narrow the life expectancy inequality gap, has been developed […]
Leadership and health inequalities by Bola Owolabi
I thoroughly enjoyed reading the BMJ Leader series of blogs on Core20PLUS5, written by the fabulous clinical fellows currently working across NHS England and NHS Improvement and Healthcare Quality Improvement Partnership (HQIP). I am heartened that NHS England and NHS Improvement’s national approach to tackling health inequalities is understood and interpreted so well by our […]
Cracking the Bamboo Ceiling by Francis Lao, Victor Do, Victor Do, Marck Mercado, Gian Agtarap, Esther Kim, Yipeng Ge, Amy Tan, Ivy Oandasan, and Ming- Ka Chan
Racism is a public health crisis (1,2,3). The COVID-19 pandemic has spotlighted racial disparities. In Canada, the highest proportions of deaths due to COVID-19 existed in neighborhoods with higher proportions of visible minorities (34.5 deaths per 100,000 in neighborhoods where >25% are visible minorities, in comparison to 16.9 deaths per 100,000 in neighborhoods where <1% […]