The failure to acknowledge that men and women have different health needs threatens the success of the government's key health goals and its modernisation agenda, concludes a report from the Equal Opportunities Commission.
National initiatives on sexual and mental health, coronary heart disease, cancer, and smoking, among others, stand to fail because of "gender blindness," says the report, details of which were presented at the UK gender and health summit, held in London last week.
The summit, the first of its kind in the United Kingdom, was organised by the UK Gender and Health Partnership, in a bid to move health equality for men and women higher up the political agenda.
Professor Lesley Doyal, lead author of the report, said that, compared with other parts of the world, the United Kingdom had seen "a significant silence" on the issue.
"[Taking account of] gender differences is essential if we are to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of health service delivery and practice," she said. "This goes to the heart of the government's modernisation agenda."
She pointed out that while gender is mentioned in government health policy, there are few concrete recommendations for putting it into practice, and it is noticeably absent from the NHS Plan.
Where gender differences were recognised these focused primarily on reproductive issues and ignored biological differences in the way men and women respond to drug treatments, she said. Instead of policies that include the needs of men and women they tend to favour one sex to the exclusion of the other—such as screening for chlamydia, which is just for women.
The report calls for gender sensitivity to be included in quality assurance and for greater training in the issues throughout the NHS.
And it suggests that people's sex should be routinely included in data on health and healthcare needs, to build an appropriate evidence base to inform policy.
Medical research should follow the US example and require gender sensitivity to become a criterion of government funding, it says.
The commission's chairwoman, Julie Mellor, commented: "Giving all public bodies a legal duty to promote sex equality would be the best way to make sure that women and men get what they need out of public services."
Anna Coote, director of public health policy at the health think tank the King's Fund, cautioned that the issue of gender was in danger of becoming polarised, because men felt that women's needs had hijacked the health agenda.
Dr Ian Banks, president of the Men's Health Forum, agreed and said that men owed a debt of gratitude to women for the way in which they had led the way.
And lest men think otherwise, "women's health is not the gold standard," he said. But men's and women's health were intertwined, he said, because of the effect on partners.
"Prostate cancer makes a lot of women very ill; cervical cancer makes a lot of men very ill," he said.
The commission's report, Promoting Gender Equality in Health, can be accessed at www.eoc.org.uk