Pink of health, not pink campaigns

Synopsis Pink's symbolic association with women's health needs to evolve beyond campaigns. True health equity demands systemic reform in policy, financing, and preventive care. A life-stage approach, integrating specialties and proactive screening, is crucial. This redesign, especially for cardiovascular health, ensures women receive continuous, dignified, and preventive care, not just reactive treatment. Pink's association with the feminine gender came about in mid-20th-c. Europe, when post-WW2, men began to wear darker colours, and brighter hues were worn to re-establish women in traditional homemaker roles. Today, pink - a mix of red's passion and white's purity - symbolises love and compassion, nurturing, comfort, warmth and hope. Pink is also a sign of good health. And, each year, we wrap women's health in this familiar palette. But what we need is more than just this short burst of visibility. We must go beyond performative healthcare to truly design care for women. Women's health has historically been treated as a 'special topic'. The result is late diagnoses, fragmented pathways and, concerning, a system that responds when disease becomes loud, instead of preventing it when risk is still low and 'silent'. If we are serious about health equity, women's care must move from symbolic campaigns to systemic reform in policy, financing, hospital design and preventive care protocols. India's health burden is dominated by lifelong non-communicable diseases. While progressive, they are often preventable with early action. Prevention is the only scalable way to protect families and productivity. Women do not experience health in isolated compartments like 'gynaecology' or 'cardiology'. Hormonal transitions, metabolic shifts, stress of caregiving, sleep deprivation and nutritional deficiencies interact over decades. Yet, the system often sees women only when symptoms disrupt their normal life patterns. A life-stage approach changes this. Adolescence is the phase to begin to prevent anaemia, build nutritional literacy and address menstrual health without stigma. The reproductive years must include proactive screening for thyroid disorders, PCOS (polycystic ovary syndrome), metabolic risk and mental health concerns, alongside safe pregnancy care. Peri-menopausal and post-menopausal years must be treated as a high-risk transition zone, not a footnote. Metabolic and cardiovascular conditions rise after menopause, along with multimorbidity, which demands more integrated, longitudinal care, rather than single-specialty episodes. Nowhere is this redesign more urgent than in cardiovascular health. For too long, heart disease in women has been underestimated, under-screened and under-recognised, often because symptoms can be atypical and risk is dismissed as 'stress' or 'fatigue'. Cost of this bias is late presentation. Screening insights show why we cannot wait for symptoms. Among asymptomatic individuals screened, a significant proportion has calcium deposits, indicating early atherosclerosis. A subset had obstructive coronary artery disease requiring urgent and aggressive treatment. Women need strong screening frameworks that go beyond basic vitals and a single lipid profile. We need risk-stratified protocols that account for age, pregnancy history, menopause status, family history, smoking exposure, obesity and sedentary patterns, supported by imaging and diagnostics when appropriate. This requires a foundational design shift. Hospitals and health systems must be built around preventive pathways. That means women's health clinics that are truly integrated - where cardiology, endocrinology, nutrition, mental health and gynaecology collaborate as one care continuum. It must include 'default' check-ups that automatically include cardiovascular risk assessment at key life stages, supported by care navigators who ensure a woman doesn't have to stitch together her own care across departments, appointments and contradictory advice. Policy must follow this logic. Screening programmes should reflect real disease burden across women's lives. Funding and insurance models should reward early detection, continuity and clinical outcomes, not just volume. Workplaces should be partners too, making preventive screening accessible and normal, recognising that women's health is economic health. Tech can boost the process, but it must be applied with purpose - build digital tools that help identify risk earlier, personalise prevention and support clinicians in decision-making. AI-enabled risk prediction and preventive platforms can help translate medical expertise into actionable pathways that reach more women, earlier, and closer to home. But tech must not result in a new form of exclusion. The goal is not smarter hospitals alone, but easier access, especially for women who manage households, jobs, caregiving and often their own symptoms in silence. The real redesign will begin when we stop asking, 'How do we run a better women's health campaign?' and start asking, 'How do we build a health system where women's care is routine, continuous, preventive and dignified?' The writer is joint MD, Apollo Hospitals (Catch all the Business News, Breaking News, and Latest News Updates on The Economic Times.) Subscribe to The Economic Times Prime and read the ET ePaper online. ...more