Our Impact

Our contribution over 40 years

Across 2022-2024, the Women’s Health Services Network undertook an ambitious, network-wide project to capture our sector’s contribution towards a healthier, safer and more equitable Victoria over the last four decades. Enabled by additional state government funding commencing in July 2022, all 12 women’s health services collaborated to produce the landmark Small change, big impact report series.

The series brings together case studies, testimonials, impact statements and other qualitative data to explore our role, reach and impact in improving health and wellbeing outcomes for Victorian women and gender diverse people

The first report - Small change, big impact – looks back on our beginnings, our development, and some of our significant impacts over this period. The second report – Small change, big impact: Two years on – focuses on our impact across the two years of additional funding. The reports speak to how far we have come, as well as the challenges still to overcome in creating a state where all Victorians are able to achieve and maintain the best possible health and wellbeing.

Some of our most significant contributions include:

  • Helping expand the scope of women’s health policy beyond a narrow focus on clinical services such as breast and cervical screening, to also include the wide range of social, economic and legal reforms needed to proactively support women and gender diverse people to live safe, healthy and equal lives.

  • Delivering nation-leading research putting a gendered lens on health issues such as health service access and equity, violence and safety, mental health and wellbeing, gender and disability, and climate change, emergency and disasters.

  • Playing a key role in achieving sexual and reproductive health legal reform such as the 2008 decriminalisation of abortion and 2015 safe access zones around abortion service.

  • Piloting some of Australia’s first primary prevention of gendered violence initiatives in workplaces, schools, communities, local government and other settings.

  • Delivering innovative research and capacity-building for more inclusive and intersectional gendered health promotion, led by experts Multicultural Centre for Women’s Health and Women with Disabilities Victoria.

Read about our contributions in the full and summary reports below.

  • “From the 1980s to current times, women’s health services have identified and actioned issues that, at the time, were invisible or of low status: ageism and older women’s health is now a national conversation; women’s mental health is a priority; LBQ women’s health vulnerabilities are part of funded mainstream programs; the health impacts of sexual violence and family violence experienced disproportionately by marginalised women has been the focus government inquiries.”

    — Dr Philomena Horsley, medical anthropologist and feminist activist (Healthsharing Women’s Health Resource Service, 1992–1996)

  • “Women’s health services are incredibly valuable prevention contributors. In fact, they are indispensable to Victoria’s prevention system for they are like no other stakeholder in their understanding and prioritisation of violence against women, their leadership and practices for preventing it, and their reach into every part of the state … I know for a fact that Victoria’s prevention system and infrastructure are the envy of other jurisdictions in the country; and that no other jurisdiction has anything like Victoria’s women’s health services sector.”

    — Dr Wei Leng Kwok, independent consultant in gender equality and primary prevention of violence against women

  • “The women’s health sector has made a significant contribution to representing the reality of surgical abortion services to government and highlighting the gaps in service delivery and absence of services in so many regions. Women’s Health Victoria, 1800 My Options and the women’s health services have been instrumental in representing this story to government, as well as in raising awareness for change at a local hospital level.”

    — Cath Hannon, Project Manager, Clinical Champions Project, Royal Women’s Hospital

  • “At Gender & Disaster Australia (GAD) we are absolutely cognisant of the impact the women’s health sector (WHS) has on all the work we do … GAD brings together the WHS and emergency management sector. It helps find the synergies between health promotion primary prevention and emergency preparedness and response. We’ve worked together to find a common language and approach. We look at tailoring this work – not forgetting feminist frameworks but finding ways to bring the framework into the organisation. It’s a real partnership, bringing together knowledges for success”

    — Steve O’Malley AFSM, Manager of Emergency Management Sector Engagement, Gender & Disaster Australia

  • “It wasn’t only the preventing violence against women discussions that we were leading; we prepared the groundwork for the community approaches to gender, gender equality and applying an intersectional approach. For example, the work we did with councils around gender, including applying a gendered lens to all areas of local government responsibility. How councils talk about this today is vastly different to 10 years ago. They have those tools embedded and now that is being supported by the Gender Equality Act. We were preparing the groundwork to have more sophisticated discussions and for that work to evolve to what we have today.”

    — Sandra Morris, Senior Engagement and Strategy Manager, Birth for Humankind (Women’s Health In the North 2009–2021)

  • “The structure of the women’s health network means that we can access women where they are. It allows the statewides to access the regions and the regional knowledge held at each women’s health service. And, by capacity-building regional services, statewides like Women with Disabilities Victoria are able to expand the reach of their work. Not by speaking for us, but by asking why we’re not in the room in all the spaces they are in. In understanding the societal barriers facing women with disabilities, and seeking to remove these.”

    — Tricia Malowney OAM, Chief Accessibility Advocate, Department of Transport and Planning Victoria (Women with Disabilities Victoria, 2004–2012)