The federal health minister, Mark Butler, says he is “astounded” that medical students can spend as little as one hour learning about menopause and has signalled that the government is likely to take action after a damning parliamentary inquiry.
On Sunday Butler told the ABC’s Insiders that several inquiries had told a “shameful story” about women’s treatment in Australia’s health system, saying there was more to do after Labor’s “modest investments” in women’s health.
On Wednesday a Senate inquiry recommended that medical professionals should be better educated on menopause during their degrees, and women experiencing menopause should be given more flexibility in the workplace.
It found that women were dismissed or offered ineffective treatments by healthcare professionals when they sought menopause care, including one who was told by her GP that all he had learned in medical school was that menopausal women were either “mad or sad”.
“Some of the conclusions of the inquiry I found really quite shocking,” Butler said.
Asked whether women going through menopause should have a right to work flexibly, Butler said the work of parliamentary inquiries was “a really important foundation for us to do more and do better for women”.
“I am astounded that medical students over a long degree would maybe spend one hour on perimenopause or menopause. Half of their patients will be dealing with this. They are complex conditions.”
Butler said earlier reports “tell a pretty shameful story about women not being taken seriously in the health system about their symptoms”, citing as evidence that it can take seven to nine years to be diagnosed with endometriosis.
“We’ve made some modest investment, I have to say, in the last budget to lift the capability of our GPs [in relation] to women in perimenopause and menopause.
“We have the review under way, of the Medicare items for IUDs and longer-acting contraception, but there is much more to do in this area.
“I’m working with the minister for women, Katy Gallagher – Ged Kearney is leading work with the women’s health sector to examine these reports and look at what we can do frankly to better support women.”
Butler’s comments came as the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, attended the Quad meeting in Delaware, signing Australia up to a Quad cancer moonshot initiative.
The program includes a boost to screening and will establish more HPV vaccination programs to prevent cervical cancer across the Pacific in countries including Papua New Guinea, Timor-Leste, Vanuatu and Fiji. Australia will contribute $29.6m for the initiative, including $13.1 from the mining magnate Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Foundation.
In the same interview Butler said he wanted to “see prosecutions” of stores flouting the ban on vapes in a shift to a “more assertive approach”.
The minister made the comment in response to media reports that vapes are now more expensive but still available from some retailers who are not legally allowed to sell them.
After the ban took effect on 1 July, Butler said the government had “taken the approach in the first few months to try to get businesses to surrender their vapes and many have done that”.
“We’ve been conducting inspections in conjunction with state authorities to hundreds of premises to inform them of the new laws and warn them of the consequences in the longer term but we have to switch to a far more assertive approach.”
Butler noted the “very serious penalties” for selling vapes include seven years in jail and $2.2m fines for individuals.
“I want to see prosecutions starting to be prepared by authorities because this is too important to the health of young people.”