AAt the first-ever TIME100 Health Leadership Forum on Tuesday night in New York City, TIME correspondent Eliana Dockterman began a panel discussion on women’s health by mentioning that one of the speakers – Dr. Natalia Kanem, executive director of the United Nations Population Fund, presented her with a bracelet backstage.
“This bracelet has 28 beads, five of which are red, representing the days a girl might miss school. Why? Because of period poverty,” Kanem said. “So we wear it to remind each other that there is something we can do to help her and make sure she completes her education.”
“I thought that would be a very appropriate symbol for what we’re going to talk about today,” Dockterman said.
Kanem was joined on stage by Dr. Tlaleng Mofokeng, the UN Special Rapporteur on the right to health, and Dr. Asif Dhar, vice chairman and U.S. life sciences and healthcare leader for Deloitte Global Consulting Services. (Deloitte is a sponsor of the TIME100 Health Leadership Forum). Mofokeng spoke about how she worked to make young women feel welcome in the healthcare system after noticing some were not showing up at clinics in South Africa. She said she tried to make the consultation situation more relaxed and even used pop culture references to make her patients feel comfortable. She emphasized the need to address sexual health and gender identity among patients in a “non-stigmatizing way.”
“We assume that the actual physical architecture of a clinic is conducive, and often that is what puts young people off,” Mofokeng said. “It got me thinking specifically about the spaces we create within the healthcare system for people to access care – that even the design needs to change to enable therapeutic conversations about services.”
Panelists focused on how many women have expressed distrust of the healthcare system. Dockterman pointed to a recent report from Deloitte that cited a 2019 survey that found one in five women said they felt a doctor had either ignored or dismissed their health concerns. Dhar added that heart attacks are misdiagnosed more often in women than in men.
“Trust is built on experience, and if someone has a negative experience, it takes quite a while to rebuild that trust,” Dhar said. He was referring to how actress and health advocate Halle Berry described at a TIME100 event in May that her doctor initially thought she had herpes, when in reality she was suffering from perimenopause and vaginal atrophy. “You can imagine the profound loss of trust,” Dhar said.
The solution, he said, is to teach people in health care “the skills to listen.” He said technology can also be used to solve this problem, but it must be “developed with health equity in mind.”
“It is equally important that these teams are staffed by health advocates, with the voice of patients and the voice of women,” Dhar said.
Dockterman gave another example of how the medical industry dismisses women’s pain. It was featured in The Retrievals podcast, which told the true story of how women complained of pain during their egg retrieval surgeries but were ignored by the clinic. It later emerged that a nurse had stolen fentanyl and the women had survived the procedure without painkillers.
Kanem said that many systems are male-dominated, but that we are now in a moment “where it is within our power to make certain changes” to combat this problem. She emphasized the importance of listening to patients and taking their concerns seriously.
“Part of human rights is understanding your worth and worth, and that starts with a girl. So I think we’re expected to listen to girls, make sure they’re educated, make sure they don’t hide when they have their period, and so on and so forth until we build a better healthcare system where “It naturally happens automatically that we listen to everyone,” said Kanem.
Dockterman also asked Mofokeng about a brief she filed in a US court ahead of the US Supreme Court hearing Dobbs vs. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. In the letter, Mofokeng argued that restricting abortion rights would violate international human rights treaties that the United States had ratified.
“The right to have autonomy and make health care decisions is a right, particularly in the context of abortion, that should be discussed between the doctor or care provider and the woman – there should be no other interference,” Mofokeng said.
She continued that the federal government does not interfere with other medical procedures such as a knee or heart transplant. “Doctors are trusted and patients are trusted to make the right decisions. Therefore, the use of criminal justice frameworks in this abortion case stigmatizes, discriminates and further marginalizes people,” Mofokeng said.
Mofokeng added that when people start to deprive others of a right – such as access to contraceptives – it is often easier to deprive others.
According to a 2017 study by the World Health Organization and the Guttmacher Institute, about 25 million unsafe abortions occurred worldwide each year between 2010 and 2014.
“When we see maternal mortality, we know that women’s health is global health,” Kanem said. “All of this can be avoided if we have a caring healthcare system.”
The TIME100 Health Leadership Forum was presented by Merck, Deloitte, ŌURA and PhRMA.
