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Earlier this month, to mark International Women’s Day, Asthma Australia travelled to the Australian Parliament House in Canberra, to launch our national campaign She Needs to Breathe: Closing the Asthma Gender Gap. Here we were joined by national icon, Cathy Freeman, who herself has asthma and helped to bring women’s asthma into sharp, lived focus.
Ministers, MPs and Senators were also out in force, around a dozen in attendance and including Minister for Health, Disability and Ageing Mark Butler, Assistant Minister for Women, First Nations and Health Rebecca White, and Parliamentary Friends of Asthma Co-Chairs Mr Tony Pasin and Dr Mike Freelander. We were also joined by world-renowned respiratory clinicians Professor Chistine Jenkins and John Blakey, as well as asthma researchers, people living with asthma, our funders and supporters, and leaders from across the health sector.
Together, this brought policy, practice and lived experience into the room to examine how asthma affects women and identify opportunities to strengthen Government’s response to an under recognised women’s health issue.
To bring the conversation to life, Asthma Australia CEO Kate Miranda invited guests to take part in a simple but powerful demonstration, breathing through a paper straw. The exercise offered a tangible insight into the daily reality for many people living with asthma, grounding the discussion in lived experience and reinforcing the urgency for action. Kate Miranda also highlighted that increasing awareness and adoption of updated clinical guidelines will be critical to tackling asthma for women and more broadly.
Minister Butler followed, opening with a reflection on his own experience of asthma as a child. He then spoke to the broader challenge of health inequity and the role government can play in driving change, highlighting reforms already improving access to care. This included 60-day prescriptions, which is an initiative supported by Asthma Australia for its impact on affordability and continuity of treatment. He also thanked Asthma Australia for its commitment to delivering the National Asthma Management Program and acknowledged the impact the Program has had on the lives of people with asthma, including women.
That impact deepened when Cathy Freeman took the floor. Cathy spoke candidly about the role asthma has played in her everyday life and sporting career. Her reflections were deeply personal and had everyone in the room on the edge of their seats imagining how fast that famous 400m Sydney Olympic run might have actually been if a diagnosis had been timely. Cathy reminded the room, that asthma is not abstract; affecting more women than men and that even gold medallists are not immune.
Assistant Minister White spoke with genuine concern about the need to better centre women’s health in policy, acknowledging that conditions affecting women are too often overlooked or under-prioritised. She reflected candidly that she had not been aware that more women are hospitalised with asthma and that asthma deaths are more than twice as high among women each year, underscoring the importance of lifting awareness and driving a stronger policy response.
The focus then turned to latest evidence. Professor Christine Jenkins, Head of Respiratory at the George Institute for Global Health outlined how asthma affects women across their lifetime, making the gender gap unmistakable in diagnosis, treatment and outcomes. Professor John Blakey, Asthma Australia’s Medical Advisor and Medical Co-Director at Charles Gardner Hospital drew the day’s themes together and reinforced the need for action. The message landed clearly: women’s asthma has been under-recognised for too long, and sustained policy and system change is now overdue.
By the close of the event, there was a clear sense that everyone in the room had been impacted, by the evidence, the lived experience and the collective recognition that women’s asthma can no longer be ignored. Asthma Australia is now focused on turning this momentum into action through the She Needs to Breathe: Closing the Asthma Gender Gap campaign, driving meaningful improvements in the health outcomes of women living with asthma.
