Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 15 June 2021
I take the opportunity to congratulate the minister on her appointment. I look forward to working with her over the coming years. I also thank everyone who sent in briefings ahead of the debate.
Women are more likely to have heart disease misdiagnosed, and to have their physical symptoms either dismissed entirely or put down to their mental health. When I first started experiencing symptoms of my disability, my parents were told that I was embellishing my hearing loss, and that the dizziness that I was experiencing was probably linked to my period or to stress.
Women need to be believed when they go for help. Being told that their physical pain is all in their mind will undoubtedly stop them from trying to access healthcare in the future. Given that many healthcare campaigns encourage people to get checked early and to ask their doctor about anything unusual that they notice, we should be trying our best to ensure that everyone’s healthcare concerns are taken seriously.
Heart disease is often perceived as a condition that affects men in particular, but ischaemic heart disease kills 2,600 women a year in Scotland. Currently, tests to diagnose heart attacks are not as accurate for women as they are for men. Seven women a day will die from ischaemic heart disease; seven families will be devastated. That does not take into account women who survive and then have to live with long-term conditions, usually on blood thinners, for the rest of their lives.
Often, we in Parliament look at our decisions through an economic lens. We look at the loss to the economy of those who cannot work after a heart attack or we look at how much it costs to run a service or a campaign. However, what we decide here affects actual lives.
Prevention of a heart attack is the difference between a family keeping and losing a mum, sister or daughter and between a person being able to enjoy their life in the way that they used to and having that irreversibly changed. Any family who has experienced that will tell us that no price can be put on saving a loved one’s life.
However, we know that income and deprivation are strongly linked to positive health outcomes. We need to tackle poverty and other drivers of poor health, in partnership with promoting good health.
Even though my amendment was not selected for debate, I will cover some of the issues that were raised in it. Pregnant women and new mothers have been particularly negatively affected by the pandemic. Women who have been pregnant and have given birth during the pandemic have been hit hard by the restriction or loss of some services.
During the first lockdown in 2020, restrictions included barring partners from attending antenatal screenings and limiting the time during which they could be present during labour. Although those restrictions have largely been lifted, they have had a profound impact on the health and wellbeing of new parents and on their relationships with their child.
In addition, pregnant women still cannot access all the services to which they are entitled. In-person antenatal classes are still suspended, with most health boards offering online e-learning modules instead. Those are a poor substitute for the supportive environment of traditional antenatal groups, which are often a lifeline for first-time parents.
Women are also struggling to access free dental care for new mothers, and I am aware that there is a growing number of women who now have to pay for expensive dental treatment because they could not access dental appointments over the past year and have passed the one-year window for free treatment after giving birth. Free dental treatment is a recognition of the impact that pregnancy can have on the oral health of new mothers, so we should be doing all that we can to ensure that women take it up.
My colleague Mark Ruskell has written to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care to ask him to extend that provision to two years post birth, for the foreseeable future. I encourage the cabinet secretary to reflect on that proposal, if he is summing up. It would be a simple but effective measure to redress the unequal impact that the pandemic has had on women’s health.
We would also like the Government to commit to retaining the provision for early medical abortions at home, which was introduced during the pandemic; to ending the two-doctor rule; and to establishing buffer zones around abortion clinics and sexual health clinics. No one should be harassed while trying to access healthcare.