Gender and Medicine Research Unit

The Gender and Medicine Research Unit is a unit within the Monash Institute of Health Services Research, located at Monash Medical Centre, Clayton. You can find out more about the foundational work that led to the unit at www.med.monash.edu.au/gendermed

The vision of the unit is to bring international programmes of gender competence into medicine and health sciences education and research in Australia. 

*“Gender” refers to the socially constructed roles, behaviors, activities, and attributes that a given society considers appropriate for men and women. See: http://www.who.int/gender/whatisgender/en/index.html

ABOUT US

Role

The Mission Statement is to:

conduct research and provide training on the workforce implications of the changing sex ratio of doctors, and identify and research the role of gender in evidence based medical research, education and clinical practice, and advocate for balance where needed.

History

The GMRU was established in 2005 by the Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences to mainstream the emerging body of evidence about the importance of gender in medical science and practice into the medical curriculum, building on a decade of work with curriculum, teaching and research into the rural medical workforce.

Activities

Teaching:  Monash Medicine, Train the Trainer manual http://med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/docs/A4TutorManual120504screen.pdf, MIHSR Seminar series, Clinical Utility of Gender Concepts in Medicine.

Research:  Best practice general practice training for women; time to treatment for heart disease; gender competency among doctors; strategies for female GPs http://med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/  

STAFF

Director:  Dr Jo Wainer

Dr Jo Wainer, PhD, is a social scientist with a life-long study of the culture of medicine and gender equity.  As she puts it ‘I study doctors while doctors study medicine’.  She is Convenor of the Gender Working Party of the Medicine Course Management Committee at Monash University.

Jo was a funded participant in the World Health Organisation Expert meeting to consider Integrating Gender into Health Sciences Curriculum held in Geneva in 2006.  She worked as a technical expert with the Medical Women’s International Association to develop a manual on gender mainstreaming for doctors in 2003. 

She was Convenor of the Gender Issues for Rural Health Professionals theme of the Wonca* 5^th World Conference on Rural Health held in Melbourne in 2002 and was a Keynote speaker at the Wonca World Rural Health Conference in Calgary in 2000, where she spoke about women as rural doctors.  Jo was a plenary speaker at the Wonca World Rural Health Conference in Kuching in 1999, speaking about international rural women’s health.  She is the primary author of the Wonca Policy on Female Rural Family Physicians and has published extensively in the area of women in rural medical practice.

Jo attended the 1994 UN International Conference on Population and Development in Cairo as a journalist, and the 1995 Fourth World Conference on Women as an adviser to the Secretary General of the Conference, and as the Australian Non-Government Organisation (NGO) representative covering the chapter on Health.  In 1996 she was the NGO member of the Australian Delegation to the Commission on the Status of Women at the UN in New York.

The Univesity awarded her the Vice-Chancellors Award for Equity and Diversity in 2005 and the Medical Faculty awarded her the Dean’s Award for Excellence in 2004 for her contribution to the equity goals of the Faculty.  In 1999 Jo was awarded a Human Rights award by Amnesty International for her work for women’s reproductive rights in the 1970s and in 2002 she was appointed to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women and elected to the Pioneer Women’s Hall of Fame located in Alice Springs.

Dr Leslie Cannold

Dr Leslie Cannold has a PhD from the University of Melbourne, a M. Bioethics from Monash University and a Bachelors degree (psychology/theatre studies) from Wesleyan University in the United States.?

She is a member of the ethics panel of the Infertility Treatment Authority, the statutory authority responsible for administering Victoria's Infertility Treatment Act 1995 and both a board member of Family Planning Victoria (FPV) and Chair of the FPV ethics committee. Her research interests include medical ethics, ex-utero gestation (ectogenesis)?women's reproductive decision-making (abortion, childlessness), anti-choice discourse, informed consent, circumcision and fatherhood (including discrepant or paternity "fraud" and post-mortem sperm donation), IVF/PGD, genetic selection and saviour siblings.

Leslie is the author of the award-winning The Abortion Myth: Feminism, morality and the hard choices women make and more recently What, No Baby: Why women are losing the freedom to mother, and how they can get it back (which made the Australian Financial Review's top 101 books list for 2005). She has been a regular guest over the years on ABC local radio and Radio National, and her views appear in The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, the Herald Sun (Melbourne), the Courier Mail (Brisbane) and the national broadsheet The Australian. In 2005, Leslie was selected as one of Australia's top 20 public intellectuals.

Gender and medicine

Definitions of gender have been developed by the World Health Organisation.  Gender skills bring attention to the ways in which biological and social differences between women and men affect health and the steps needed to achieve health equity. http://www.who.int/gender/en/

International partners include medical curriculum developed by the Ottawa collaboration in Canada http://www.genderandhealth.ca/

and research on heart disease with the Karolinska Institute http://www.ki.se/medicin/medicine_ks/cardiology_unit/index_en.html

Core competencies in women’s health, which form a framework for competencies in gender and health, have been developed by the Association for Professors of Obstetrics and Gynecology (APGO) in the United States in collaboration with the Ford Foundation http://wheocomp.apgo.org/

The Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education has defined the 6 competencies for doctors that underpin competency based assessment that we are using to support the introduction of core competencies in gender and medicine http://www.acgme.org

Projects

Macdonald M, Wainer J (2006) Best Practice Delivery of General Practice Training to Female Registrars: The VMA  Centre for Gender and Medicine, Monash Institute of Health Services Research, Monash University, Clayton.

Australian Film Corporation March (2006).  Contributor to documentary Abortion, Corruption and Cops; the Bertram Wainer story.  This was supported by many reviews, interviews, newspaper articles, a Film Australia launch and associated publicity.

Wainer J. (2005) Transition Strategy for the National Rural Female GP Network, GRFNet Monash University Centre for Gender and Medicine, Clayton.

Ambanpola L, Eisenbruch M, Wainer J, Colville D, Lawless A, Weeks C (2005)  Achieving gender and cultural competence by Australia’s medical workforce The Centre for Culture and Health, University of NSW, Sydney.

A gender competent national study of rural doctors in Australia Sustainable Rural Practice: successful strategies from male and female rural doctors

Education

The Center for Gender and Medicine provides education to medical faculty and trains tutors in gender competent medical science and practice.  We contribute a workshop on Gender and Cultural Competence to the Spring and Autumn educational series established by MIHSR.

A training manual for medical educators to support gender competent medical education  Gender and Medicine: a Conceptual Guide for Medical Educators

A website dedicated to introducing gender competence into medical curriculum  http://med.monash.edu.au/gendermed/

A Canadian website with gender competent medical education curriculum material http://www.genderandhealth.ca/