DOI: 10.21064/WinRS.2019.3.5
Gender approach to health and healthcare analysis remains an underdeveloped area of social research. Improved clinical practice and biomedical research have allowed for significant progress in studying the relationship between gender and health. However, differences between men and women in society are mostly social rather than biological in nature, which demonstrates their social and cultural conditionality. However, gender issues in healthcare are difficult to analyze since biological and social differences in this area are closely intertwined. Nevertheless, it is important to understand the methodology of gender approach to health and healthcare and the mechanisms of its practical application. It is the consideration of gender balance in development and implementation of national health policy that should become the basis for working out multi-purpose strategies aimed at promoting gender equality in health and creating appropriate institutional arrangements. The purpose of this article is to identify technologies that should be applied in health system based on gender approach to support health status of women and men in different periods of their lives, to improve the effectiveness of health system based on interdisciplinary, intersectoral interaction of all stakeholders. In the first part of the article, based on a review of the main trends and methodologies of promoting gender approach in health and health care, a definition of “gender point” is suggested and justifications of its application to the development of health policy are proposed. The second part considers gender points in healthcare in the context of the interaction of mechanisms for setting and achieving sustainable development goals, their coherence and interdependence, emphasizing the role of gender as a cross-cutting theme of social development of modern society. And finally, in the third part, starting conditions are analyzed for the application of the gender points technology in the practice of promoting a gender approach in Russian healthcare policy, through the analysis of situations where the need for such technology arises. The authors develop the notion of gender points in order to show the key problems of the linkages between gender, health status and healthcare system as well as their interaction with other social determinants of health in order to achieve sustainable health outcomes.
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