Our priorities

Centring women’s health and wellbeing needs

We work alongside the state government to identify the current priority women’s health issues we need to focus on. These evolve over time, based on what our research and community consultations tell us are the most pressing health and wellbeing issues for Victorian women.

We play a dual role in:

  • helping shape the state’s programmatic and policy design based on our research, consultations and the emerging evidence base

  • translating government evidence, research and policy into on-the-ground practice.

Below are our current priority issues with examples of work underway.

Gender equality

  • Building local, regional and statewide gendered data and evidence to inform better legislation, policy, programs and services.

  • Driving action on government legislation by supporting Defined Entities to meet their obligations under the Gender Equality Act 2020.

  • Delivering key components of the government’s gender equality strategies: Safe and strong, and the new Our equal state.

  • Empowering women to make informed choices about their and their families’ health and safety through initiatives like the MCWH-led WOMHEn project, which supports Victoria’s migrant and refugee health promotion workforce to deliver in-language place-based health information to communities across the state.

Gendered violence prevention

  • Supporting delivery of Royal Commission into family violence reforms, including as key partners and designated ‘backbone organisations’ implementing Free from violence: Victoria’s strategy to prevent family violence and all forms of violence against women.

  • Leading more than 500 Victorian public, community and private organisations to develop, deliver and evaluate coordinated best practice prevention work through the nine regional violence prevention partnerships and strategies that cover every Victorian LGA.

  • Delivering high-quality evidence-based training and professional development for the state’s violence prevention workforce and contributors.

Sexual and reproductive health

  • Leading a statewide systems approach through the state’s first gender transformative framework, the women’s health sector-developed A theory of change in sexual and reproductive health for Victorian women.

  • Driving delivery of the Victorian Government’s Women’s sexual and reproductive health plan 2022-2030, including through coordination of sexual and reproductive health partnerships, strategies and actions in every region.

  • Improving service provision, reach and access through advocacy, health sector professional development and community health literacy.

Mental health and wellbeing

Women in a changing society (climate change, emergency and disaster situations)

  • Building the evidence base on gender, climate and disaster work, including the unequal gendered impacts of the pandemic. We provide evidence and advocacy for an intersectional analysis across recovery efforts.

  • Supporting recovery from the 2022 Victorian floods, including helping keep the needs of women and gender-diverse people in focus for recovery policy and programs.

  • “The Clinical Champions Project is a hospital-based project building access and equity to reproductive health services such as abortion … We rely on local intelligence to tell us who the key players are and who we need to reach in the community to make connections. Women’s health services across the state have been our local voice and have been very instrumental in developing these connections. They’ve really smoothed the pathways for us and amplified our efforts to have a truly statewide reach.”

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

  • “Women’s health services haven’t only embraced frameworks to prevent violence against women; they have led the way in applying them through cross-sector partnerships, collaborative endeavours and coordinated action so that gender inequality can be disrupted as the first or primary cause of violence … When it comes to prevention leadership and reach, I would say that the most enduring legacy and biggest impact of the women’s health services is the capacity and infrastructure they have built over the last decade or so, so that the work of preventing violence against women can get done and done properly.”

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

  • “My work is in very male-dominated workplaces and the women’s health services (WHS) have enabled me to take their work and translate it into this context … The WHS has consulted with us and provided training and support on how to approach this – on what it looks like to make these structural changes. The information that firefighters need to have to make real changes.”

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