About Us

	Who we are
	Our vision
	Our focus
	What we do
	Who we work with
	Our way of working - assumptions and principles
	Promotional fact sheets
	History

Who we are

Women's Health Victoria is an independent Victorian state-wide women's health promotion organisation run by women for women. We work to identify and respond to the health issues of the women of Victoria through a feminist perspective and a social model of health.

We are informed by, and encourage the validation of, women's experiences of health and ill-health. We promote women's right to control our own bodies in every aspect of health care and work to empower women and communities to act on health matters through the use of information.

Our women's health information Clearinghouse forms the core of our organisation. It provides the basis for our work representing women and facilitates access to health information to a range of users from diverse locations.

We work collaboratively and in partnership with other organisations. These include women's health services, general health services, women's services, funding bodies, policy makers, and individual health professionals.

We are a learning organisation with explicit quality improvement processes. We aim to be a centre of excellence providing capacity building expertise in women's health information collection, analysis and provision, and organisational development.

Women's Health Victoria is primarily funded by the Department of Human Services and is one of three state-wide and nine regional women's health services which make up the Victorian Women's Health Program. These organisations are all members of the representative peak organisation Women's Health Association of Victoria (WHAV).

More information about what we do can be found in the section Our Work consisting of:

• Advocacy
• BreaCan: breast cancer support
• Capacity building
• Clearinghouse of women's health information
• Partnerships
• Victorian Women with Disabilities Network: advocacy information service

Our vision

A society in which there is an accepted approach to health that is empowering and respectful of women and girls; one that recognises the importance of gender in determining health outcomes and utilises a sound gender analysis in policy making and in health and community service design.

Our focus

WHV has a statewide role in creating and using women’s health knowledge to:

• inform health, social and economic policy
• inform the design and delivery of better health responses, systems and models of care
• support and empower women in their health choices

What we do

1. Facilitate access to good quality, current information by:

• maintaining and developing high quality, evidence-based knowledge on gender and health
• providing information and support the translation of knowledge

2. Generate new knowledge by:

• progressing a gender and health framework across the state
• sharing and promoting quality service delivery models

3. Build capacity to transform knowledge into action, better policy and practice by:

• identifing and strengthening relationships to progress gender and health advocacy
• working with our community of interest to improve gendered policy development, service provision and health promotion practice

Who we work with

Our community of interest includes individuals and organisations who work in areas which influence health outcomes within services; information providers; policy and opinion leaders; researchers; and educators.

Relationships may be based on:

• Ongoing partnerships
• Issue specific collaborations from time to time
• Broad networking

WHV continues to work particularly with women with poor health outcomes including women in and post prison, women with disabilities, women with women’s cancers.

Our way of working: assumptions and principles

Assumptions

• A gendered approach produces better health outcomes.
• Investment in better health outcomes for women means better health outcomes for women, children, families and communities.
• Health an d wellbeing are created outside the health system.
• Knowledge is an evolving and changing construct that is shaped by experience and by the conversations we have about that experience.
• For knowledge to be of value it must be quality assured and derived from a sound evidence-base.
• Ensuring an authentic understanding of women’s experience is an essential part of creating women’s health knowledge.
• Information provision is a process, not just a one-off event - for information sharing to happen the proc ess must be responsive to the needs and capacities of the individuals and groups receiving the information.
• Approaches to seeking information and knowledge are diverse and will change over time for women and for the professionals involved in providing he alth services, designing health systems and creating healthy environments.

Principles

• We work from a feminist framework that incorporates a rights based approach.
• We recognise the diversity of women’s lives.
• We acknowledge the critical importance of respect and an approach that informs and empowers.
• We believe a holistic way of working that takes into account all of life’s circumstances is critical to the promotion of good health and to the provision of c are and treatment of illness.
• We acknowledge that relationship building involving partnership and mutual cooperation is a powerful tool for change.
• We understand that trust, confidence and credibility result from transparent, accountable behaviours.

Promotional fact sheets

WHV has developed a series of promotional fact sheets that describe various aspects of our activities. The fact sheets provide a succinct description of the focus of WHV's work in women's health promotion and gender advocacy. Each fact sheet is a single page document containing pertinent information that is in a printable format.

Access to the first series is available here:

• Our Organisation (PDF 30KB)
• Strategic directions (PDF 34KB)
• Why women's health? (PDF 25KB)
• Gender analysis and advocacy (PDF 25KB
• Victorian gendered data directory (PDF 25KB)
• Gender impact assessment papers (PDF 32KB)
• Clearinghouse (PDF 26KB)
• Clearinghouse Connector (PDF 30KB)
• Banners (PDF 30KB)

History

Women's Health Victoria was formed as a result of the 1993 amalgamation of HealthSharing Women (established in 1988) and Women's Health Information Resource Collective (established in 1983). The amalgamated organisation was known as HealthSharing Women's Health Resource Service until 1996.

In 1996 , the name of the organisation was changed to Women's Health Victoria and the development of a women's health information clearinghouse commenced.