Women's Health Research Wales

Women’s Health Research Wales is committed to eliminating inequalities in the health and wellbeing of girls, women, and people who were assigned female at birth.

It is an all-Wales research centre dedicated to women’s health, funded by Health and Care Research Wales.

Aims

To improve women’s health and social care in Wales, the Centre will:

1. Develop an impactful, interdisciplinary, and methodologically rigorous research portfolio.
2. Create a collision space for academic-industry partnerships to trigger innovation and commercialisation.
3. Facilitate long-lasting cycles of co-production and priority setting involving policymakers, NHS staff, the public, and the third sector.
4. Develop acceptable and feasible policy to integrate sex and gender into health and social care research in Wales.
5. Build a thriving network of experts to become future researchers, practitioners, policymakers, third sector, and industry leaders in women’s health.

Research

The Centre’s research will focus on four thematic areas:

Health(y) transitions across lifespan: disease risk and moderators, including biological transitions, screening and prevention to improve women’s health and ensure healthy transitions.

Early onset and life-long conditions: management of health conditions that uniquely or disproportionately affect women which are not preventable but can be managed.

Stigmatised and rare conditions: sex and gender effects in rare diseases and stigmatised conditions as these are poorly understood compared to other conditions.

Under-served women’s groups: intersectionality of social identities and how they moderate causes, manifestation and progression of disease, and access and response to healthcare.