Women’s Health Tasmania

Women’s Health Tasmania

Mr President, Women’s Health Week was celebrated last week from 7 to 11 September.  It is an Australia-wide campaign centered on improving women’s health and supporting healthier choices.

Now in its eighth year, recognition of Women’s Health Week continues to grow.  In 2019, more than 112 000 women participated in over 2800 events, and almost 45 000 women subscribed to the online campaign.

In honour of Women’s Health Week, I would like to recognise a wonderful local organisation – Women’s Health Tasmania. 

Women’s Health Tasmania is a health-promotion charity run by women for everyone who identifies as a woman.  Its vision – healthy Tasmanian women – and its values – respect, equity and solidarity – encapsulates the essence of Women’s Health Tasmania.

It aims to be Tasmania’s key voice advancing women’s health and wellbeing, where health is defined as – a state of complete physical mental and social wellbeing and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.

Women’s Health Tasmania is overseen by a voluntary board made up of 11 elected women members, and run by a team of dedicated health workers, activity providers, facilitators, administrators, childcare workers and volunteers – all led by CEO Jo Flanagan.

To give you a sense of the scope of the services provided by Women’s Health Tasmania, in 2019-20 Women’s Health Tasmania had 8812 occasions of service for women across 83 per cent of Tasmania’s local government areas. 

These services included over 4000 class and activity attendances, over 1200 online class attendances, 932 calls to the information line, 480 drop-in clients, and 247 counselling appointments.

I think members will agree that Women’s Health Tasmania provides an extensive list of services and support for the Tasmanian community and Tasmanian women.  It offers allied health services, including Bowen therapy, community nursing, continence services and hearing tests.  They also have counselling and psychology and support services along with complementary therapies, such as hypnotherapy.

Women’s Health Tasmania hosts a number of peer-support groups, including breast cancer support, a sewing group, writers support, and the fabulously named Waste to Wonderful – a textile-sharing group for migrants and refugee women.

Included in the suite of services are health-promotion classes, meditation, tai chi, yoga, mindfulness and specialised exercise programs, including the incredibly helpful Encore program, an eight-week post-surgery exercise program for women who have experienced breast cancer.

Women’s Health Tasmania also run workshops for all stages of womanhood, from stress management – which comes at any stage of womanhood, I might say – to Baby and Me, managing mother guilt, through to menopause and pelvic floor exercise workshops.

As it did for so many organisations, COVID-19 forced a major rethink of how Women’s Health Tasmania offers its services.  COVID-19 hit women really hard, and Women’s Health Tasmania could see the impact anxiety, unemployment, poverty, family violence – and these are crises – and difficulties accessing help was having on its clients.

Innovating madly, Women’s Health Tasmania reached out to connect with people through online services, classes and forums.  It recorded a brand-new podcast series called She’s Out There, covering varied and diverse aspects of sexual and reproductive health.

It started a blog on topics as diverse as why poker machines are particularly a problem for women, to cosmetic surgery on women’s genitals, to managing endometriosis.  Quite a spread.

I love the ingenuity shown by this group in the early stages of this move to online and diverse delivery.  Without proper cameras or tripods, they filmed classes using mobile phones taped to yoga blocks taped to chairs.  They filmed in lounge rooms, bedrooms, kitchens; and that is when they remembered to press ‘record’ on the machine.

Teething problems aside, CEO Jo Flanagan reports that six months in, Women’s Health Tasmania’s online classes now rival the best that YouTube has to offer.

In 2019, Women’s Health Tasmania hit the road talking to women living in rural and remote areas of Tasmania, later also reaching out to women who identified as LGBTQ, particularly those living in rural communities.

They discovered that although country women generally enjoy a strong sense of community and belonging, they also experience huge woman-focused service gaps, poor internet access and digital literacy, and are hit by higher cost barriers in accessing basics from healthy food, services, transport to health care.

Sadly, countrywomen also spoke about their disillusionment with short-term funding and pilot programs that had begun in their areas but were not sustained.  Women’s Health Tasmania will continue its strong advocacy on those issues in pursuit of its mission – healthy Tasmanian women.

Coincidentally, Women’s Health Tasmania is holding its 2020 annual general meeting today. 

CEO Jo Flanagan kindly gave me an advance copy of the 2019-20 Women’s Health Tasmania annual report.  It is an engaging read about the resilience of women and their capacity to change direction when encountering the unexpected.  I encourage members to look at it when it becomes publicly available after the annual general meeting later today.

I am delighted to advise that Women’s Health Tasmania is a semi-finalist for a Physical Activity Community Achievement Award.  These awards encourage, acknowledge and reward those achievements that make Tasmania a better place.  I offer my congratulations on the nomination of Women’s Health Tasmania and wish the very best of luck to the whole inspiring team.

Members – Hear, hear.