Health System

Women's Health Action examines the health system from a consumer perspective.  We always want to know how the system serves women and consumers and what can be done to improve it.  We have watched changes and reforms over the years and strive to  keep the consumer informed of the impact these changes will have on them.

Health System- General

Setting the standard for health and disability

September 2001 Women's Health Watch

Standards New Zealand has developed a new health and disability standard for the Ministry of Health, with a surprising result. Sandra Coney takes a close look

'An important milestone in the goal to achieve a systematic approach in the delivery of health and disability services' and'the culmination of over two years extensive collaboration between the health and disability sector providers, consumers/kiritaki, the Ministry of Health, the Health Funding Authority and Standards New Zealand' is how Dr Karen Poutasi, Director-General of Health, described the new Health and Disability Sector Standards: Te Awarua o te Hauora...

We could only find one women's group, from Hawkes' Bay, that had participated in the process. The groups that had participated were predominantly those concerned with disability groups, mental health services, and residential and institutional care, as well as a great number of DHBs, or CHEs or HHSs as they were variously called over the long period of the development of this standard....Read More

The Politics of Public Health and Health Promotion: Who Decides and For Whose Good?

Sandra Coney, Director of Women's Health Action, gave this address to the Ethics of Health Promotion Conference organised by the Research Unit for the Ethical and Legal Analysis of Health Care. It was held in Auckland on 27 September 1996.

I want to make it clear from the start that I support public health and health promotion as approaches to health. In my own work I have a public health orientation and much of the advocacy work that Women's Health Action does is health promotion work. But this focus is tempered by the contacts I have with individuals, and the awareness this brings of their needs and concerns.

My perspective is also informed by 25 years of feminist activism around health, and my deep suspicion arising from this experience, of anything done 'for my own good' or anyone else's good.

Public health has been defined as 'the collective action taken by society to protect and promote the health of entire populations' and further 'public health is broad and inclusive'. I want to challenge these definitions, at least within the New Zealand context, although I suspect that things would be very little different elsewhere. These definitions express an ideal, but I see little of them being put into action. This claim of collective action sounds to me suspiciously like the royal 'we'....Read More