Take a visit to certain neighborhoods in Philadelphia and you may be shocked to see that nearly all of the women there are smokers. Take a short drive to a different neighborhood, however, and you may find that nobody smokes.
Which leaves the question: Why are the same amount of dollars spent on smoking cessation programs in every neighborhood?
The answer, says Eileen Sullivan-Marx, is that policymakers, politicians, health officials and researchers have never had the full picture of exactly what is going on with women in urban areas. According to Sullivan-Marx, associate dean for Practice and Community Affairs at Penn’s School of Nursing, nobody, either in academia or government, has even taken the step of synthesizing all of the available data—about women’s health, about urban health, about senior health—to finally understand the unique challenges faced by women in Philadelphia and other American cities.
But after a recent think-tank hosted at Penn by the School of Nursing and the Penn Institute for Urban Research, that data synthesis may finally take hold.
And if it does, Sullivan-Marx says, policymakers may begin looking at the health challenges of urban women in a completely new—and more effective—way.
“We had somebody with the Philadelphia Department of Health on one of our panels,” Sullivan-Marx said. “She was saying that she had data on women, and she had data on health, but she doesn’t always have that data put together. She doesn’t have it broken down by neighborhood, or how it relates to the environment. So this was a real wake-up call for her, to say, ‘We need to put this data together.’”
The think tank, “Women’s Health is the Community’s Health: Impacting Women’s Lives in Urban Places,” brought together academics from across all disciplines, as well as government health officials on both the local and national levels, to discuss new ways of looking at the unique health issues facing women in urban environments.
The event was co-sponsored by the School of Medicine, the Institute for Women Health and Leadership, the Drexel University School of Medicine and the City of Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
“One of the things we’ve recently found is that people in either policy or politics or government or scholarship generally look at one of the aspects [of this]—they either look at women, or health, or urban areas,” Sullivan-Marx says. “But nobody has ever really looked at all three together. That idea fostered a dialogue.”
But now comes the hard part: Putting the ideas raised at the event to work.
Along with her colleagues at Penn, Sullivan-Marx is working to develop a scholarly agenda to link local issues to global issues in women’s health. It’s a process that will require work from researchers of various different backgrounds and expertise.
And for that reason, she said, Penn is uniquely positioned to handle it: Few, if any, major research universities, Sullivan-Marx says, have fostered such a well-functioning interdisciplinary environment, as has Penn.
“At a lot of universities, the health sciences campus is completely separate from the rest of campus. But here at Penn, we’re all together,” she says. “That’s why I think the Penn community is uniquely prepared to come together on this topic.”
Originally published Oct. 18, 2007.
