Men’s health focus in Journal of Primary Health Care
The December 2009 issue of Journal of Primary Health Care (JPHC), which is edited by my wife Felicity Goodyear-Smith, has a men’s health focus.
In the editorial she writes:
The health of our men contributes greatly to the health of our nation. Overall men have a poorer health status than women and use our health services less frequently. They die earlier than women and more of their deaths are avoidable.
A guest editorial by Lannes Johnson explains why encouraging men’s awareness of, and attention to, health issues is vital for our society as a whole. He notes:
Men’s shorter lives have not been shown to be due to biological differences and behavioural differences may account for some disparities (e.g. accidents, suicides, cancer and deaths from cardiovascular disease), but certainly in NZ we do spend a lot more on women’s health. The role of this differential allocation of health budget has not been fully investigated.
Other papers discuss how men’s life expectancy can be improved, and one doctor reports on “Well Men” checks.
Particularly interesting is a debate between two doctors with the moot: “New Zealand should introduce population screening for prostate cancer using PSA testing”.
Finally, there is a review of the book ‘Healthy Bastards’ by Dave Baldwin.
You can download the December 2009 JPHC articles (or the complete journal) as PDFs from the Journal of Primary Health Care Archive.
Over the pond in Victoria our state government’s main web site has the following index on its Health and Community resource…
Animals & pets
Children
Community services & programs
Disability services
Families
Health
Hospitals
Housing
Medical conditions
Medical services
Seniors
Women
Youth
Notably numerous classes of people and even animals and pets get a guernsey on this index. For some reason men do not.
While I’ve seen this type of thing before it’s only ever been smaller agencies such as DV services which, due to funding, may have no choice. This is a state government in a modern western democracy. There is no excuse.
When questioned about this oversight/slight the responsible minister pointed out a couple of single items for men on the state’s site. However, without knowing explicitly what to look for, there is no way to navigate to those resources. Six months has gone by and no effort has been made to rectify the original problem.
This state of Victoria apparently does not consider men to be a part of the community nor does it value their health.
Comment by gwallan — Sat 12th December 2009 @ 9:32 am