That’s the message delivered by a showcase of girls’s well being providers held at Parliament House this week.

The Women’s Health Services Network introduced collectively representatives of 12 state government-funded providers to showcase their work to MPs and guests by way of a sequence of shows in Queen’s Hall.

‘To be perfectly honest, we know that 51 per cent of the population is often unseen,’ says Tricia Currie, Chair of the Women’s Health Services Network and CEO of Women’s Health Loddon Mallee.

‘We’re right here to showcase what we accomplish that that girls will be seen for the work that they do every single day in so many various environments and settings. Work that really makes a distinction for rural ladies, for migrant and refugee ladies, for all these ladies who are sometimes unseen,’ she says.

Across Victoria the ladies’s well being providers work in gendered well being promotion, major prevention and gender fairness. Crucially, Tricia Currie says, the providers have deep connections to their native communities.

‘We know that we get better outcomes for women’s health when we work in partnership with place-based organisations,’ she says.

‘So consequently our partnerships are with local governments, sporting clubs, hospitals and a whole range of organisations that actually have an interest in promoting good health through the social determinants of health, the things that impact on women’s health like economic empowerment and education.’ 

The community has 5 priorities in selling ladies’s well being: stopping violence in opposition to ladies; gender equality; sexual and reproductive well being; selling ladies’s good psychological well being; and girls in a altering society (local weather change, emergency and catastrophe conditions).  

‘All of our work centres women’s voices, so our work always links into the lived experience of women in terms of the issues that are important to them,’ she says. 

Tricia Currie says investments in ladies’s well being providers are bettering outcomes for Victorian ladies. 

‘The fertility clinics, the impartial endometriosis clinics, the sexual and reproductive well being hubs, are making a distinction, however there’s a lengthy strategy to go. 

‘There are still more opportunities to actually start to really understand that there are particular things in regards to women’s health that are not well supported in the general understanding and health literacy that we have. So understanding women’s bodies is crucial,’ she says.