Women's Health

Mission:

To help prevent and reduce the burden of illness or disability that uniquely or disproportionately affects women at each stage of life and ultimately to improve the health status of women in South Carolina across the lifespan.

What Do We Mean By Women's Health?
As practiced in the DHEC Women’s Health Program, Women’s Health embraces all the years of a woman’s life, from cradle to grave. We call it women’s health across the lifespan.

Traditionally, the term “Women’s Health” has been mainly an obstetrical term. It is viewed in the context of women’s childbearing and may otherwise be described as preconceptual health, reproductive health, family planning, pregnancy, and childbirth. While these are clearly important aspects of women’s health referring to a critical time in women’s lives, the new definition of women’s health recognizes the limitations of this view: Women as childbearers are not all of what women are about, nor should understandings of their health be confined to that.

The new definition of Women’s Health reflects the consumer-inspired trend to view women patients as whole persons with affected body parts, instead of body parts attached to or contained within a female body where the uterus is the first focus of attention. The new definition of Women’s Health also recognizes that women’s reproductive organs and hormonal system do affect women’s health their entire lives, demanding new research to understand these affects. This is seen, for instance, in girls who enter puberty at age seven or eight, in menopausal women taking hormone replacement therapy to prevent heart attacks and osteoporosis, or in older women diagnosed with breast cancer at age seventy or up.

Women's Health In Public Health

Women’s Health as defined above is fairly new to the public health arena. Women’s Health Coordinators were established in state public health agencies only since the 1990’s when the national Office on Women’s Health (OWH) was created in the United States Department of Health and Human Services (USDHHS). The OWH’s mission is to address women’s health across the lifespan, including the areas of research, policy, advocacy, clinical care, and health promotion and education. OWH created regional offices around the nation which relate to the states. State Women’s Health Coordinators work with Regional WH Coordinators to accomplish the mission of OWH.

For public health practice in state agencies, this potentially means new ways of doing business. It means...

In fact, in the Year 2000, women's health and public health arrived at a significant crossroads in their understandings of research and practice. Both fields recognized that demographic factors and social determinants play a key role in determining health status.* The Healthy People 2010 Objectives for the nation’s health clearly states that we must address these other factors if we are truly to improve the health of a population.

So practicing women’s health also means public health joining with new, sometimes unexpected, partners to pursue common goals. It means re-organizing our knowledge and attitudes around other sets of data, such as quality of life and community health measures, instead of death statistics cited out of context. It means giving new generations of women a prescription for better health through primary prevention, while arming them with the knowledge and resources to be savvy health care consumers.

    

The USDHHS Office on Women's Health, the Healthy People 2010 process, and the Community Development Movement recognize the importance of gender, race/ethnicity, income, education and access to care as causative factors affecting people’s health status. In addition, they recognize that health status should be seen, not just through the traditional public health measures, but through the community social determinants of health, such as racism, sexism, ageism and poverty. (See Healthy People 2010 Objectives for the Nation report.)

Specific Program
Sexual Assault Prevention and Treatment Program

This program provides technical support to central office and regional staff and customers (primarily adult and adolescent females). The program supports the S.C. Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (SCCADVASA) as well as 16 rape crisis centers throughout the state. These centers provide prevention and treatment services to survivors in all 46 counties of the state. The program monitors $1.6 million in state and federal funds earmarked for sexual assault services.

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