Page 17 - Demo

Heart disease is one of the biggest killers of women around the world.
Dr Linda Worrall-Carter, the founder of the organisation, and I worked together on cardiac and mental health research when we were both professors in university. Dr Worrall-Carter is a cardiac nurse specialist. Her passion is gender- specific care in cardiac populations, specifically with women’s cardiac health.
The organisation’s mission is about informing women, empowering, raising awareness – reaching out to health professionals and women, and people with women in their lives around awareness raising of heart disease
in women across the generations. Importantly, it’s not just looking at older women, because we know that heart disease can affect women of all ages.
Our education campaigns – information sharing – are all based
on research. And while we look to participate in research, we’re also using the research to make it more easily digested by people in the community. We create information in different formats so that it’s accessible to the majority of people.
We’re also focused on people with women in their lives. This includes family members, loved ones and friends. We realised that our community is a large community and not just women. But it’s focused on women’s heart health.
Our belief is that we don’t want to reinvent the wheel. We want to be innovative and contemporary. It’s about empowering people, giving people
a space to share their story, to help people have a voice about their health. An example of that on our website
is the work we’ve undertaken with indigenous communities. A big part of sharing knowledge among indigenous peoples is about telling stories and sharing stories, and certainly that resonates across the different diverse backgrounds that people have, as well. A big part of our belief is that education and awareness can drive change.
So that’s really about lifting the health literacy of our community.
You’re largely a digital platform. Are there any other campaigns or any other ways that you deliver the education or empowerment through Her Heart?
Her Heart is primarily digital, but
we certainly do have a face-to-face presence with seminars, symposiums,
“Heart disease is one of the biggest killers of women around the world.”
workshops and things like that. Obviously, in light of the last year, it really changed with Covid. We’ve really been able to stimulate our digital presence, and to drive change during that period. [Online] you can reach people without having to put people at risk of Covid.
We’re trying to reach out in contemporary ways, and to provide a single evidence-based source for information, accessible 24/seven. That’s a really important part of our mission and our vision.
Like I said, we lead with prevention. We know, from feedback from our community, and also looking to evidence that social copying actually drives awareness, that awareness drives change. And what I mean by social copying is that it’s about influencing change through others’ experiences,
or messages and topics. So, that’s where we’ve tried to influence a prevention message.
There are other initiatives that we’re wanting to drive forward, not the least of which is around connecting people in the aftermath of the pandemic.
Our website is really the heart of our work. We connect with people using that space. So, whether we have webinars, or things like that, that are accessible to people from our website –
and we do have videos on our YouTube channel – we connect that through
our website. That’s another way of interacting with people. It’s not just about text and facts sheets or things like that. We’re trying to be multimodal with the messages that we’re getting out there.
Your website states that a vision of Her Heart is to decrease female deaths from heart disease by 50 per cent by 2025. How close are you to achieving this target? How do you aim to achieve it? That’s a really good question. We keep a close eye on the Australian statistics because we’re talking, obviously, primarily about Australian women, but we don’t underestimate the fact that we do have an international community, as well, that may connect with us.
So, we look at the numbers that are coming out of Australia and what is
the leading cause of death in women. Back in 2014, the leading cause was coronary artery disease. It’s still up there, but it’s starting to pare back a
bit. That means the efforts that have been put out there in the public arena, in public health, around prevention and awareness, alongside all the other work that’s been done by other organisations, are having an impact. I would like to see those numbers continue going down. But so far, with numbers decreasing,
it says that the work’s effective in some way, helping the public health message.
How many women are diagnosed with heart disease annually?
In Australia, be it male or female, every 28 minutes a person dies from heart disease. When we look at women specifically, we lose one woman to heart disease per hour. They’re frightening numbers.
When you think about the cost and everything associated with that, we know that heart disease will cost
$2.2 billion in the healthcare dollar between 2017 and 2018. In the year 2017-18, it accounted for a third of all total prescription medicines dispensed, according to the Australian Institute
of Health and Welfare, which was reported last year ... [This proportion] may actually change in light of Covid, because we know when people have coronavirus there are some long-term effects. I’ll be interested to see how things go over the next five years with how that plays out.
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AWARENESS SPOTLIGHT 15
RETAIL PHARMACY ASSISTANTS • APR 2021