Victoria's first women's pain standard: what believing her looks like

Ninety percent.

That number is not the proportion of women who experience pain — it is the proportion of 13,000 surveyed women who said their pain had lasted over a year. Fifty-four percent live with it daily. Seventy-one percent say a healthcare professional dismissed them when they raised it.

The patient who typed her condition into the search bar at 11pm already knows this terrain. She has been in rooms where the blood tests were normal, the imaging was unremarkable, and the appointment ended with a referral to self-care. She is not imagining it. She is not catastrophising. She is describing a system — a system that, until very recently, had no formal requirement to believe her.

This week, Victoria changed that. In what appears to be the first standard of its kind in Australia, the Victorian Department of Health has released a clinical standard requiring that women’s pain is believed, listened to, investigated, and managed — and that culturally safe, trauma-informed care is provided at every encounter. It applies to all Victorian public health services, including 20 women’s health clinics and 20 sexual and reproductive health hubs.

It is worth sitting with what it means that this needs to be formalised in writing.

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Both sides of this

The optimistic reading: this is a systems-level acknowledgement that dismissal is not a personal failing of individual practitioners. It is a structural pattern — widespread enough, documented enough, harmful enough, to warrant a government mandate. Standards like this create an institutional foundation. They make expectations visible. They give the patient something to point to.

Associate Professor Magdalena Simonis, who has worked in the general practice and women’s health space for decades, put it plainly in coverage of the release: “If a woman does not feel listened to, she will be less likely to return, and the condition might deteriorate.” The standard recognises that the failure to listen is not just distressing — it is clinically consequential.

The harder reading: a standard is not a guarantee. The conditions covered — endometriosis, menstrual disorders, musculoskeletal pain — have diagnosis delays measured in years. Endometriosis alone still takes up to a decade to reach a formal diagnosis in Australia. A document mandating belief does not automatically change the consultation patterns of thousands of clinicians, many of whom trained in an era where women’s pain was routinely framed as functional, hormonal, or psychosomatic. The survey finding that 89% of respondents say pain has affected their mental health is not surprising — it is what happens when a physical problem is repeatedly reframed as a psychological one.

The standard also begins in Victoria’s public system. Private general practice — where 91% of women with pain conditions present first — is not bound by it. That gap matters.

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What this means this week

If you have been dismissed, you now have language for what should have happened.

The standard is specific: pain must be investigated, not normalised. Pain relief options should be discussed before a procedure — not handed to you as an afterthought. You should be treated as a partner in the decision. Culturally safe care, for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women and for women from culturally and linguistically diverse communities, is an explicit requirement — not an aspiration.

That language has weight in a consultation, even in general practice, even outside the formal mandate. The most useful thing a standard like this does is give patients a framework for naming what good care looks like — and for recognising when they are not receiving it.

In general practice, GPs remain the first contact for the majority of these presentations. If you have a painful gynaecological condition, ask before any procedure: what are the pain management options and when can we discuss them? It is a reasonable question. The answer tells you a great deal.

Across the conditions most commonly flagged — endometriosis, menstrual disorders, pelvic pain — the evidence base for effective treatment exists. The problem has rarely been the absence of answers. It has been the absence of someone willing to ask the right questions.

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Verdict: yes — worth knowing about.

The first formal standard requiring belief is a threshold moment. It does not solve the problem. It names it. And naming it, at a governmental level, is not nothing.

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Sources cited

1. Australia-first standard tackles women’s pain — Medical Republic
2. Endometriosis — Jean Hailes for Women’s Health