Women: Representation and Empowerment — House of Lords, 2016-03-07
Topic: Health
Elizabeth Barker (Liberal Democrats, Centre to centre-left): My Lords, it is an absolute pleasure to take part in today’s debate and to have listened to the excellent maiden speeches of the right reverend Prelate the Bishop of Gloucester and the noble Baroness, Lady Mone. I, too, have things in common with them. I was raised in a religious household, albeit of a different variety from that of the right reverend Prelate, and I worked in a greengrocer’s when I was at school. Indeed, there was a time when I could weigh perfectly a pound of vegetables in my hand. Like them, I never thought that I would end up as a Member of your Lordships’ House. That I did is owed in part to visionary people like John Stuart Mill and William Beveridge who believed in women’s place in society and did what they could to encourage our involvement in it. I look forward very much to working with the right reverend Prelate and the noble Baroness to make sure that, now that we are here, lots of other women benefit as we did from such efforts The noble Baroness, Lady Williams, started in 1866. I have to go one better than that and say that in 1865 Elizabeth Garrett Anderson qualified as the first female doctor in this country after some considerable application to do so. In 1872 she managed to open the first hospital for women and children. Let us flip forward to December 2015 when the Chief Medical Officer issued her report, The Health of the 51%: Women. I want to talk about a group of people who get only one mention in that report, and that is LGBT women. As I say, we got only one mention and that was in relation to violence. Domestic violence is an issue in our community—let us not run away from that; and I thank the Government for their recent financial support for Broken Rainbow UK, the charity which deals with these issues—but is it our biggest presenting issue to the National Health Service? No, not by any stretch of the imagination Many large-scale studies show that lesbian, bisexual and trans women are much more likely to have long-standing health conditions and that we are particularly at risk of known public health risk factors such as smoking and drinking. We have a significant percentage of women who have sex with women and contract STIs, but very little information is made available to women on how to protect themselves. We even have health practitioners who wrongly think that lesbians are not entitled to some of the screening that other women receive, and that is dangerous. We also know in our community that there is very little information at all for us on matters to do with cancer. Why should we be considered to be different from other women when it is as big an issue for us as it is for anyone else? Finally, as lesbians grow older they are much more likely to be alone. In 2004 the Stonewall report Unhealthy Attitudes explained a bit why this happens. It surveyed 3,000 health and social care staff. Some 24% of staff had heard colleagues make negative remarks, while 57% of NHS staff did not think that a person’s sexuality had any bearing on their health whatever, and 72% of patient-facing staff had not been given any training at all I am happy to share a little of my personal experience. When you call in for a routine screening, the person who engages with you says, "Well, what about contraception?". You think, "I don’t need it". They then say, "Well, at your age you might think you don’t, but perhaps you do". When you sit there and say, "No, I really, really don’t need this", the dynamic and the trust disappear completely. It is a terrible situation in which women go to their health providers and just feel that they do not have any confidence that they will be treated correctly and with respect The noble Lord, Lord Cashman, referred to the ground-breaking report of the Women and Equalities Committee from earlier this year, which talked about trans women’s health. We know that there is a particular problem in that we do not have enough surgeons to meet the demand from women who need to have surgery, and who do not have support for their mental health, quite apart from the physical health. More than that, we do not have staff at primary care level who have been through the training and can deal with those women as they would other people. It was interesting to sit and listen to people giving evidence to the committee about how they had gone in with common health complaints and had been referred to the gender identity clinic—as if those in the gender identity service knew what to do about respiratory illness or whatever. It is completely and utterly inappropriate. The National Health Service is a great institution and I do not want to run it down, but those of us who are taxpayers and LGBT women have a right to deserve better—just to get what everybody else does Following the publication of a number of these reports, including Unhealthy Attitudes, NHS England ran some round tables and acknowledged that, in particular, patients and the workforce should be monitored to ensure that much greater attention is paid to the health and social care needs of LGBT women, not least under the Equality Act’s public sector equality duty. I ask the Minister: what steps has the NHS taken to implement the recommendations in the LGBT action plan and what is its plans for next year? How will it ensure that we are included in that? In the light of the findings of the Women and Equalities Committee’s transgender report, what are the Department of Health and NHS England going to do about the admittedly dire situation of provision for those women Medical pioneers such as Elizabeth Garrett Anderson realised something important: it is only when we live in communities that understand our needs as individuals, and when we have institutions that bring us together on the basis of our similarity and not trading on our differences, that we become a successful economy and society. In the spirit of International Women’s Day, I ask the Minister to consider my questions and give us some answers.