Local woman named president of women?s health foundation

Karen Kramer, administrative director of Cox Health Systems' Hulston Cancer Center and The Women's Center, was named president of the National Asso-ciation for Women's Health Foundation.

Kramer said the foundation is fairly young, with 2002 be-ing its third full year as an entity. "Its primary mission is to support the goals of the National Associa-tion for Women's Health," Kramer said. The association's fo-cus, she said, "is promoting goals which help advance the art and science of women's health in the areas of women's health and research."

The foundation's financial goals are growing with the organization.

"We raised $15,000 in our first year, and in our second year, we raised $32,000. This third year, we have a fund-raising goal of $100,000," Kramer said.

Initiatives that the foundation hopes to support are in the areas of women and cardiac health and women in medical re-search.

"We have a project we're working on right now with a potential contributor, that will be looking at setting up an awards system for hospitals around the country that look at putting best-practice research in women's health in practice," Kramer said.

She added that research is a key problem area for women's health.

"Despite the federal guidelines to try to include more women in research, women are still under-represented in clinical trials," Kramer said.

"A second problem that exists is that once they do have research out there that shows there may be differences in wo-men's health, it's sometimes hard to get that information out and get it into practice and change the way we're actually treating and diagnosing women," she added.

Cardiac health is one aspect of health care in which it's important that doctors and hospitals utilize research findings for diagnosis and treatment.

"In the area of women and heart health, they know through research that women present differently with heart at-tack symptoms," Kramer said. "But among our own health care providers and women in general, that information is not fully understood or recognized yet."

For example, in addition to or instead of the usual signs of a heart attack shortness of breath, pain in the center of the chest the left side, chest pain that radiates into the left arm, nausea and vomiting and sweating women might also have back and shoulder blade pain, weakness in the chest, arms and shoulders, fainting or lightheadedness, heart palpitations, cold sweats, denial and unexplained anxiety.

Kramer said the association and the foundation are looking at ways to im-prove the education of health-care professionals for diagnosing and treating heart attacks among women.

"We can save more lives if we diagnose and treat early," she added.

Kramer noted that her position with the foundation is a hands-on role.

She said the board will continue to build the infrastructure for the foundation and developing its donor base, and it also will work to increase community awareness of the NAWHC and the foundation.

In addition to cardiac health, Kramer said the NAWHC also has worked for positive advancement in breast cancer and osteoporosis, among other issues. She said a challenge the organization deals with is getting people to see wo-men's health care as a whole.

"Despite the fact that the association has been around for 15 years, there still is a tendency for people to think, when they think of women's health, to think of perinatal health, maternity," Kramer said. "And we're trying to get people to broaden their range of thinking to women's health as more than that, and that it's unique and different, and we need to always be considering that in whatever venue that person's in," Kramer said.

Additional information about the National Foundation for Women's Health and the NAWHF is available online at www.nawh.org.