MS BURCH (Brindabella—Minister for Disability, Housing and Community Services, Minister for Children and Young People, Minister for Ageing, Minister for Multicultural Affairs and Minister for Women):
I acknowledge the traditional owners of the land, the Ngunnawal people, and I offer them my respects.
I am pleased to join you today for the launch of the report - ‘It Goes with Territory – ACT Women’s Views on Health and Wellbeing Information’.
This is a comprehensive statement on the challenges facing women as they seek to navigate the health system and access dependable health information.
This was a substantial research assignment, involving a survey with more than 670 responses, focus groups and a follow-up survey.
While the report canvasses the range of impediments to accessing health services and information — including GP shortages and the cost of health for some women — it also describes quite cogently the increasing complexity of the health information we seek to explore.
We know that women remain the primary seekers of health and wellbeing information, not only for themselves, but for partners and their children.
Every day women are making choices about their family’s health.
This is why it is crucial that women are supported in accessing dependable health information – information that will benefit them, their families and ultimately the wider community.
Through ACT Health and the Office for Women we work diligently to provide information that is both pertinent and reliable.
We have done this mainly through traditional communications means, such as brochures, advertisements, news articles and forums.
These days the Internet is growing rapidly as a source of health information for many people — and women in particular.
Some of this information is extremely useful and well researched; however, medical misinformation — or what some people call “cyberquackery” — is rife.
For many, the reason for going ‘online’ for health information is compelling. It’s immediate and free.
We may require more information about a medically diagnosed disease or illness. Or we may want to find out about alternative medical treatments. We can even seek, via chat-rooms, the support of others with similar problems.
For those women responsibly seeking credible and trustworthy information online – the pitfalls and dilemmas are obvious and this throws up many challenges for government — and organisations such as yours — alike.
I found your research most interesting — and indeed opportune — in this regard.
It suggests that in Canberra the GP remains the principal source of health related information, followed by — you guessed it — the Internet. Pharmacists, somewhat surprisingly, are a distant third.
Interestingly, however, despite many women accessing the Internet for information, more than sixty percent indicated they were unsure of the quality of the information available.
Encouragingly, Canberra women are not using the ‘net’ in isolation from other information sources and use the resource with caution.
Respondents referred to “trusted” sites and wanted knowledge on how to identify these.
The challenge specifically for any Government in this regard is to continue to enhance ‘internet literacy’.
We will continue the on-going development and promotion of the ACT Health Internet site as a primary source for “trusted” information on women’s health issues in the ACT.
We would like the “Women’s Centre for Health Matters” to consider working with us to enhance the ‘women’s health’ information already provided on the website, so we can better meet the needs of the female audience.
I know that the report recommends such a partnership and your research will certainly assist this undertaking.
We’d like to converse with you, for example, about what’s missing on the ‘site’, about new categories we should build up and promote, and about further authoritative sources — both local and national —we can link to the ‘site’.
I would say in closing that that the Government is very encouraged about the increasing usage of the website, with more than 70,000 individual users now accessing its content every month.
While these are matters principally for the consideration of my colleague, the Minister for Health, such feedback — and any subsequent discussion — can only serve to enhance the development of a quality health system that meets the confirmed needs of Canberra women.
I commend the Women’s Centre for Health Matters for undertaking this research project and for the comprehensive report.
It is with pleasure that I launch the report. Thank you
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