Abstracts from the Symposium of the Belgian Association of Public Health 2024

BackgroundThe scientific evidence is clear: women face more health problems throughout their lives than men.The reasons are not purely biological.Research shows that population-level differences in health are influenced by social factors, particularly the way the health system perceives and responds to people's needs.People are diagnosed, treated and monitored differently by health professionals depending on their gender, with women often at a disadvantage.What is the situation in Belgium?Do the prevention, diagnosis and treatment provided by the Belgian health system help to reduce health inequalities or, on the contrary, risk exacerbating them? Materials and methodsWe analysed the accessibility of Belgian health care in its four dimensions: responsiveness to health problems, availability of care, affordability and acceptability based on the data (available in open access and also available for internal use by mutualities) of the healthcare use. ResultsWomen in Belgium can encounter many difficulties in solving their health problems.A few examples from the fields of prevention (breast cancer screening), diagnosis and treatment (cardiovascular diseases) and the organisation of care (inequalities within the health professions) illustrate these difficulties. ConclusionWithout claiming to be exhaustive, this study provides, for the first time, an analysis of the Belgian health system from a gender perspective and makes a number of recommendations to policy-makers and health system managers in order to reduce health inequalities between women and men.