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The Gender and Women’s Health Unit is supporting regional
training courses for health professionals to improve their understanding of
gender and its application in training, research and services. The two
courses are outlined below.
Integrating Gender in Medical Education
GWH supported the development of a pilot course for
medical educators entitled Integrating Gender into Medical Education, developed,
organized and conducted by the Achutha Menon Centre for Health Science Studies (ACMCHSS) at the Sree Chitra Tirunal
Institute for Medical Sciences & Technology in November 2003 and
attended by participants from India, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Indonesia, Maldives,
Myanmar, Nepal, Thailand, Sri Lanka and East Timor. Based on the pilot,
ACMCHSS is revising the course and plans to run it in the future.
In addition, GWH is providing seed funds for pilot initiatives
to incorporate gender into medical teaching, research, and services.
Transforming Health Systems: Integrating Gender and
Rights in Reproductive Health
The 1994 International Conference on Population and
Development in Cairo and the 1995 Fourth World
Conference on Women in Beijing
declared that women’s empowerment and reproductive rights are essential for
the realization of sexual and reproductive health. WHO’s curriculum for Transforming Health Systems: Integrating Gender and Rights in
Reproductive Health was created in direct response to this call.
Reproductive health exemplifies the complex interaction
between sex and gender differences between women and men. Many women’s reproductive health problems are the
consequence of gender inequality and inequity and lack of power to decide
about how and with whom they will have sexual relations, or whether and when
to bear children- not simply biological factors. For women, sexual and
reproductive health is not just dependent on their own behavior but, more
fundamentally, but on the behavior of their sexual partners, other family
members and service providers.
In order to achieve improvements in reproductive health,
policies and programmes must promote gender equity and the realization of
sexual and reproductive rights for women. The course focuses on
improving participants’ understanding of gender and rights so that they can
plan more effective programmes and services. It offers both conceptual
and technical skills and tools for practitioners to integrate promotion of
rights and gender equality into their policies, planning and
programmers. GWH, WHO Myanmar, and the Department
of Reproductive Health and Research, WHO Geneva provided support for the
implementation of the course for program managers in Myanmar in December 2003.
During 2004-2005, GWH is supporting training-of-trainers
courses in training institutions in the region.
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