Despite the fact that women in Ireland have a longer life expectancy, they have less healthy life years than men.

This was stated by Marian Harkin MEP when she addressed a conference on women’s health in the European Union organised by The European Women’s Lobby and the National Women’s Council of Ireland in Dublin.

She said that a far greater focus was needed on disability free life expectancy for women and on the measures required to extend healthy life years for them.  Referring to cervical cancer, which affects 30,000 women each year in the EU, the Independent MEP said that it was the only major disease where prevention was possible for almost every single case through population based screening and vaccination.  It was particularly important to bring together screening and vaccination programmes in a concerted campaign which could deliver a prevention rate of 95% for cervical cancer, she said.

Geography and other issues unfortunately played too great a role in the availability of health services for women, Marian Harkin said.  Within Ireland women in rural regions were discriminated against in the provision and location of services.  If Irish women lived in at least seven other EU countries they would have access to 17 obstetricians and gynaecologists per 100,000 population compared with Ireland’s 2.2 per 100,000 population, she stressed.

There was a requirement for a reliable and comparable data on access to health care across the EU, she said, and a need to implement standardised gendered data collection in areas where current data was either non-existent or non-sex specific, Marian Harkin MEP concluded.