The project was structured around four key work packages: Project Management, Capacity Building for VET Providers, a Gender-Sensitive VET Program for Healthcare Professionals, and Awareness-Raising Activities. Each work package was meticulously designed to enhance gender sensitivity among healthcare professionals, educators, and students, ensuring that gender perspectives are integrated into medical training and practice. Through research, training modules, pilot programs, and widespread dissemination efforts, EqualHealth sought to equip VET institutions and healthcare professionals with the tools needed to recognize and mitigate gender disparities in diagnosis, treatment, and patient care.
The right to health is one of a set of internationally agreed human rights standards, and is inseparable or 'indivisible' from these other rights. However over the last years, gender inequity and gender bias in healthcare has been widely proven and studied. Gender eguity in healthcare is defined by WHO as the customized distribution of resources and opportunities across a population to ensure no subset of groups are at a particular disadvantage over others in achieving their maximum potential. Gender bias refers to the tendency to prefer one gender over another. Both of these phenomena are apparent in healthcare services. Research has proven that women die consistently from cardiovascular disease at a higher rate than men, even though both genders respond to treatment the same way. Therefore, it’s safe to assume the increased danger for women lies in the response to their heart attacks, not in the heart attacks themselves. Furthermore, heart attacks often do not cause the same symptoms in women as they do in men. The symptoms can be much less painful and alarming in women. Another example is pain management. Women are diagnosed more with chronic pain, however many testimonies from women refer to the same pattern of their pain "no,