This resource was created in a partnership between the National Library of Medicine Outreach and Special Populations Branch and the National Institutes of Health Office of Research on Women’s Health. The purpose of this page is to present topics pertaining to women’s health collected to support the mission of the Office of Research on Women’s Health to promote research in the field.

CDC Women's Health Topics offers the latest news, research reports, statistics, and A to Z health topics about women’s health issues.

womenshealth.gov is published by the Department of Health and Human Services Office and provides articles as well as information on topics, such as pregnancy, women with disabilities, and body image.

National Women's Health Resource Center offers information about a variety of women’s health topics, the latest news, apps, blogs, and health management tools.

World Health Organization, Department of Gender, Women and Health addresses disparities in women’s health around the world.

GirlsHealth.gov gives adolescent girls reliable, current health information and motivates girls to choose healthy behaviors. Created by U.S. Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS)

Office on Women’s Health (OWH), information is offered in English and Spanish.

Food and Drug Administration Information for Women's Health offers tools, videos, safe medication programs, and other educational resources in English and Spanish.

Healthfinder.gov Women's Health offers A to Z health topics, National Health Observances, health news, conferences, and health care reform updates.

National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine: CAM and Women's Health provides resources and clinical trial information about alternative therapies used to treat women’s health issues, such as menopause, osteoarthritis, and urinary tract infections.

This page provides a small selection of resources available from the Tutt Library catalog, as well as reliable www databases and websites.  For a more comprehensive compilation of information and resources, see the *Women's Health Resources* research guide.

*Special Thanks to librarians Martha E. Meacham, Jennifer Moyer, & Sally A. Gore (University of Massacusetts Medical School) and Debra A. Thompson (Rhode Island College) for many of the resources compiled in this guide.

We all have a voice, and there are many ways to make our voices heard.  

Send an email, write a letter, make a phone call, knit your congressman a vagina, run for public office, become informed on the issues, and most of all, vote!

Should politics have a role in women's health care? 

Some health care decisions for women, particularly those concerning reproduction, contraception and abortion, are no longer simply medical issues between a woman and her doctor.  With increasing frequency, federal and state legislatures have begun to regulate the ways in which women can have access to reproductive healthcare, and have found ways to limit the availability of not only the treatments themselves, but medical insurance which would pay for them.

The articles below are a selection of news and opinions published in 2012 about the politicization of women's health issues during the national and state elections.

Sex-Specific Medical Research: Why Women’s Health Can’t Wait

A Report of the Mary Horrigan Connors Center for Women’s Health & Gender Biology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital

Report looked at four diseases – heart disease, depression, Alzheimer’s and lung cancer – and how detection, treatment, and prevention was transformed by sex-specific research. The report also dicusses how women are often left out or underrepresented in everything from basic biomedical research to clinical trials, also noting that sex specific data, when collected, is not often published.

Women’s Health Curricula: Final Report on Expert Panel Recommendations for Interprofessional Collaboration across the Health Professions

Published in May 2013 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration Office of Women’s Health. The purpose of the study and resulting detailed report was to summarize recent literature and current state of  women’s health curricula across health professions, identify key strategies for interprofessional collaboration, and to develop a dissemination plan to share findings from the report and create greater awareness of women’s health education needs.

Women’s Health Research: Progress, Pitfalls, and Promise

"Even though slightly over half of the U.S. population is female, medical research historically has neglected the health needs of women. However, over the past two decades, there have been major changes in government support of women’s health research—in policies, regulations, and the organization of research efforts. To assess the impact of these changes, Congress directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to ask the IOM to examine what has been learned from that research and how well it has been put into practice as well as communicated to both providers and women.

In this report, the IOM finds that women’s health research has contributed to significant progress over the past 20 years in lessening the burden of disease and reducing deaths from some conditions, while other conditions have seen only moderate change or even little or no change. Gaps remain, both in research areas and in the application of results to benefit women in general and across multiple population groups. Given the many and significant roles women play in our society, maintaining support for women’s health research and enhancing its impact are not only in the interest of women, they are in the interest of us all."

"By all accounts, 2011 was a watershed year for challenges to women's reproductive rights. State legislators introduced more than 1,100 anti-abortion provisions and had enacted 135 of them by year's end."  Laura Bassett, Huffington Post

Click on the graph to enlarge it.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office on Women's Health provides Quick Health Data Online, formerly known as the National Women's Health Indicators Database, an interactive system that provides reliable and easily accessible health data to help assess needs, develop programs, and inform policies.

The Women’s Health and Mortality Chartbook is a statistical resource on women’s health in each of the states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. The chartbook was developed to provide readers with an easy-to-use collection of current jurisdiction data on critical issues of relevance to women. A total of 28 different health indicators are featured, which highlight some of the key issues related to women’s health that are being measured regularly at the state level.

The 2011 Health Disparities Profiles examines key health indicators at the state level for different racial and ethnic populations in each of the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. Twenty-two health indicators are presented, which highlight some of the key areas related to health disparities among different populations. It can be used as a reference for policymakers and program managers to identify areas where major health disparities exist in each state.

ClinicalTrials.gov  is a research database and registry of publicly and privately supported clinical studies of human participants maintain by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institude of Health (NIH). It is a resource that provides patients, researchers, health care professionals, and the public access to a wide range of clincial studies on diseases and conditions. 

ResearchMatch is an NIH funded initiative with the collabration of several academic institutions to connect people searching for research studies, and for researchers seeking people to participate in their studies. it is a free and secure registry for the public with clinical studies looking for health participants to partcipants with specific health conditions. 

The NIH Clinical Research Studies is a database on clinical research studies conducted at the NIH Clinical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The Clinical Center hosts a wide range of studies from rare diseases to chronic health conditions, as well as studies for healthy volunteers. Users can search by diagnosis, sign, symptom, other key words, or institution.