The Canadian Women’s Heart Health Summit is taking place in downtown this weekend, focusing on heart, brain and vascular health in women.
The event is being held at Rogers Centre Ottawa Friday and Saturday from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Both days will be filled with seminars and sessions of the different topics.
The event is hosted by the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Centre at the Ottawa Heart Institute and the Heart & Stroke Foundation, with more than 300 national and international experts health professionals, and women living with heart disease and stroke attending.
“Despite significant progress to improve women’s cardiovascular health since the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Centre launched in 2014, heart disease and stroke are still the leading cause of preventable death among women in Canada,” says summit co-chair Kerri-Anne Mullen, director of the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Centre, in a news release.
The summit will address key health challenges affecting women and cardiovascular care.
“What’s more, heart and vascular disease in women continues to be under-researched and under-recognized, with critical disparities in care, treatment and health outcomes. The summit has played a key role in stimulating advancement in women’s health in Canada over the past decade, but there is still more to do,” Mullen says.
The summit will help shape the future of women’s health covering topics such as treatments, care, support, diagnostics and complications.
“The progress in women’s heart and brain health over the last decade is in large part due to significant investments in research and awareness by Heart & Stroke and partners as well as critical policy changes by researcher funders like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research,” says summit co-chair Christine Faubert, vice president of health equity and mission impact at Heart & Stroke.
“The next step is to put this ongoing research into action, which will create positive changes in clinical practice and the healthcare system. These are the conversations I am looking forward to having this week.”
The event will also highlight ways to improve education, health literacy, and community engagement to better support women’s health.
Jullianne Code was diagnosed with heart failure at the age of 27. She says it was a difficult diagnosis, especially at a young age.
“It took almost three weeks before they figured out what was wrong with me. And by that time, I was so sick that I just collapsed,” she said.
Code says her medication kept her stable for a few years until she had a stroke in university and discovered that her heart was getting worse, as it was all clotted. Code says she was lucky enough to be gifted a second heart transplant.
Code is now a speaker at the summit with a lived experience and says the expertise that the panalist brings to the table is valued and incredibly important.
“Through my own lived experience, through working with heart life and through working with organizations like the Canadian Women’s Heart Health Alliance and Cardiovascular Society, heart and stroke, all of us coming together to achieve this goal, which is to ensure that there’s adequate funding for research that women are engaged in this research so that the right questions are being asked, and that that information is reaching care teams, physicians and all the appropriate people,” said Code. “That kind of peer mentorship and support has been instrumental in helping to maintain, or helping me not feel alone in this journey.”
Jackie Ratz has been living with heart failure for the past nine years. She says she was diagnosed with cancer at the age of 24, which caused implications on her heart.
“I am what would be considered a successful, heart failure patient because I’ve never landed in hospital,” said Ratz. “I slept into heart failure with my heart function dropping below 20 per cent, and that started my journey into long term disability. I got a CRT device, so I have my own defibrillator that I carry around in my chest.”
Ratz started up a Facebook group because Canadian women with medical heart issues support each other, share experiences and motivate each other. Ratz says being part of the summit has opened the door for her to be able to have access to great clinicians and nurses, as well as researchers.
“There’s still lots of work to do but more and more we’re seeing that patients’ voices are being valued,” said Ratz.
Visit WomensHeartSummit.ca for more information.
