Jen was in the grip of a heart attack. A nurse dismissed it as stress

Central Coast mother of two Jen O’Neill, 44, was in a hospital bed after her second of three heart attacks in six years when she overheard a nurse talking to a colleague about her condition.

“She thinks she’s had another heart attack, but it’s probably just stress or a panic attack,” O’Neill heard the nurse say.

Jen O’Neill felt she was being belittled when she was having a heart attack.Credit: Janie Barrett

O’Neill had suffered a spontaneous coronary artery dissection, or SCAD, which is a sudden tear in a coronary artery that can slow or block the blood flow to the heart, triggering a heart attack.

The rare and serious condition predominantly affects women in their 40s and 50s. O’Neill was otherwise fit and healthy and said having the attack dismissed as stress felt “a bit undermining”.

“That really played to the perception that I was being a burden and that I was wasting resources,” she said.

O’Neill’s experience is among a litany of female frustrations spanning decades that have driven The George Institute for Global Health, the Australian Human Rights Institute at the University of NSW Sydney, and Deakin University to establish a new national centre aimed at tackling chronic gender disparities in the health and medical sectors through research, policy and education.

The Centre for Sex and Gender Equity in Health and Medicine, which launches at UNSW on Wednesday, aims to improve health outcomes for all Australians, but particularly women and LGBTIQ+ communities.

The George Institute’s founding director, Professor Robyn Norton, who is a member of the National Women’s Health Advisory Council, said females were underrepresented in health and medical research, which had traditionally revolved around “male cells, male animals and male humans”.

“Our knowledge about many health and medical conditions comes from what we know about what happens to, frankly, white middle-aged men,” Norton said.

Health researcher Professor Robyn Norton.

“We’ve applied that knowledge in terms of prevention, diagnostics, and treatment. And increasingly, we see that women’s health outcomes are poorer than those of men, and that leads to inequities.”

The centre forms part of a burgeoning global reckoning on gender disparities in health care.

Norton said generalising male-centred research results for women and gender-diverse patients often led to lengthy delays in diagnosis and intervention, inappropriate treatment or dosing, different responses to medicines and devices, and the dismissal of pain or symptoms.

She said heart attacks were a prime example. Men and women typically felt chest pain; however, women often also had symptoms such as nausea and back pain. These differences often meant women didn’t seek help immediately, and health workers didn’t always recognise the symptoms.

O’Neill said she dismissed the discomfort in her left arm, odd sensation in her breast and severe nausea as mastitis when she had her first heart attack. She was later given medication, including tablets for high blood pressure and cholesterol, which caused bruising, heavy periods, and fatigue.

“I became very aware there was a hell of a lot of research into treatment for heart attacks, but it was all based on men, not on women. Now I know men and women experience them differently.”

Norton said the centre would support research and training on the role of sex and gender in health and medicine, as well as translating research to help inform health practices, services and products.

“Our vision is to ensure that an understanding of sex and gender is integrated into all aspects of medical research, policy and practice and, in doing so, we believe that’s going to lead to marked improvements in both health outcomes and health inequities for Australians.”

Pointing to an initial area of focus, she said a recent review of medical journals published in Australia had shown only about 30 per cent analysed their data separately for men and women.

“In three years, if we can change the way in which we publish in medical journals, then we can make a huge difference.”

Norton said Australia was lagging behind Canada, North America and Europe and hoped the research centre would thrust the country onto the “world stage”. She said it would also explore how sex and gender affected health outcomes for First Nations people, the elderly, those with a disability, and residents of rural and remote areas. “I think if we can do that we’ll be really quite unique.”

Earlier this month, a nation-first survey of nearly 3000 Australian women, health professionals and interest groups found two in three females had experienced bias and discrimination in healthcare.

Federal Assistant Health Minister Ged Kearney said much of this gender bias originated in research, and the new centre represented a “large step forward in fighting what I call medical misogyny”.