CEDAW/C/1996/3/Add.1
English
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and research needs as related to women's concerns in the context of primary
health care. The ninth general programme of work of WHO gives attention to
matters affecting women's health and includes targets on several aspects.
22. A working group for Beijing was convened to coordinate the input to the
Conference and to ensure a high profile for women's health on the proposed
Platform for Action. This group will continue to work on the follow-up to
Beijing. Discussions have been held with the various programmes in WHO and
mechanisms for strengthening the commitment and action on women's health are
being put in place, including the continuation of the Working Group that
coordinated WHO's inputs into the Conference. Activities such as the collection
of women's health profiles and the identification of women, health and
development country focal points, are ongoing in the regional offices.
23. WHO has long sought to ensure sex-specific data collection on mortality and
morbidity, focusing particular attention on collecting data to fill information
gaps on issues that affect only women and that have been neglected in many
official data collection efforts. The Division of Family Health continues to
maintain several bibliographic and/or indicator databases on women's health and
has close links with other programme areas with sex-disaggregated data sets. It
is planned that eventually these databases will form the starting-point of a
comprehensive bibliographic and indicator database on women's health across the
lifespan, bringing together all available information from different programme
areas.
24. There is a recognized need for mechanisms for bringing together the
information in a coherent manner and, more important, for disseminating it to
those interested in women's health. This would permit a move away from a purely
disease orientation for classifying women's health into one that starts from the
concept of good health and permit the definition of indicators to measure and
assess it. It would also permit the identification of information gaps, the
definition of relevant and appropriate indicators, stimulate research and foster
the development of data collection instruments appropriate for analysis of
women's health needs.
25. A feasibility study for the establishment of a resource centre on women's
health has been undertaken with the support of the Carnegie Foundation. The
study has just been completed and a report is in preparation; the
recommendations include a gradual building up of databases and resources on
women's health. The unit will disseminate the information thus amassed to
others working in the field, particularly women's groups and NGOs around the
world, policy makers and planners. The women's health resource centre would
build on existing databases currently maintained by the Division of Family
Health on maternal mortality, maternal morbidity, coverage of maternity care,
nutritional anaemia in women, incidence of and mortality from abortion,
prevalence of infertility and adolescent health.
26. Stimulated by the activities of the Steering Committee on Women, Health and
Development, and by linkages with the Global Commission on Women's Health, there
is a growing awareness among WHO's programmes of the invisibility of women's
health problems. This has led to efforts to quantify the extent of
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