Research tells us that, across Canada and Prince Edward Island, women and gender diverse people experience more and greater barriers to health care.
We know that stigma can deter women and people who are gender diverse from seeking services. We also know that bias and lack of awareness can negatively influence the availability, nature, and quality of treatment and services provided. These challenges may be compounded for Islanders who are Black, Indigenous, or People of Colour.
In 2020, the government of Prince Edward Island recognized the need for additional research and health-related services for women and gender diverse people and created a Steering Committee with representation from health and diversity policy makers, health clinicians and practitioners, university researchers, and community advocacy and service groups.
In 2021, research was conducted via workshops, surveys, key informant interviews, and focus groups. The Steering Committee then examined strategies and research about the health of women and gender diverse individuals, taking into account social determinants of health. From these findings, Awareness to Action: A Health Strategy for Women and Islanders Who Are Gender Diverse was developed.
The high level of engagement used to gather research enabled this Strategy to identify best practices and to incorporate the advice, expertise, lived experiences, and concerns of women and people who are gender diverse.
This work is new and still evolving across the country—most provinces do not have a comparable, up-to-date health strategy in place. Currently, PEI is the only province in Canada to have a Health Strategy for gender diverse people.
Awareness to Action: A Health Strategy for Women and Islanders Who Are Gender Diverse sets out measures to make services and settings across PEI more welcoming, gender sensitive, trauma-informed, and culturally safe.
The Strategy is based on the following 8 guiding principles:
- Equity: Any change must contribute to health equity.
- Evidence-informed: All decisions and initiatives will be based on current and reputable research, data, and knowledge from lived experience and practice.
- Cultural Safety and Humility: All spaces must make women and people who are gender diverse feel welcomed, accepted, respected, and culturally safe.
- Awareness: Understanding people's lives, what affects them, and who they are can help us meet their needs as fairly and completely as we can.
- Diversity of Voices: All policies and strategies must be based on a broad range of representation, including those with lived health experience, health care experts, and community organizations.
- Whole Person Approach: Services must be designed to consider the whole person, factoring in all elements of an individual that might affect health status.
- Confidentiality: All information must be treated in an ethical, confidential manner.
- Safety: Women and people who are gender diverse should feel safe when accessing or providing services
The Strategy considers an “Islander” to be anyone living in Prince Edward Island. It also recognizes that each Islander’s health and mental well-being is shaped by a unique mix of personal and societal factors. Compared to cisgender men, women and gender diverse individuals are more likely to encounter challenges such as violence in the home and the community, bullying and harassment in schools and workplaces, caregiver burden, and inequitable labour market outcomes and resulting high rates of poverty. For many of those women and gender diverse people, those challenges are compounded by intersecting factors such as age, presence of disability, and race.
To that end, the Strategy identifies recommendations in the following 4 priority areas:
- Make health care settings and services more welcoming and culturally sensitive
- Strengthen services that meet the health needs unique to women and gender diverse people
- Build better, more navigable pathways to health services and care
- Carry out research on how health services can better contribute to the health of women and gender diverse Islanders
Furthermore, the Strategy includes performance metrics and a governance framework to support continuous improvement during and after the Strategy's initial implementation, with planned updates scheduled for 2027.
Awareness to Action: A Health Strategy for Women and Islanders Who Are Gender Diverse is intended to have impact across multiple settings. All initiatives will impact health-care settings, but some initiatives could impact other government-funded settings, including learning institutions, libraries, recreation facilities, and social services.
To learn more about the health gap and disparities for women and gender diverse people, visit here.