Men’s health foundation Movember is calling on the government to invest in a men’s health training and education program for GPs.
Research out of the Movember Institute of Men’s Health found that two in three Australian men either want to leave their regular health provider or have already left due to a perceived lack of personal connection.
Of the men who decided to break up with their healthcare practitioner, one third – representing 15% overall – stopped seeing a practitioner entirely.
The findings are from a poll of around 1700 Australian men surveyed as part of Movember’s “real face of men’s health” report, released last week.
Other key insights were that around 9% of men wait two or more years after the onset of symptoms to seek medical attention and that a quarter said their doctor rarely enquired about concerns beyond their presenting complaint.
Movember Institute researcher Professor Simon Rice, a clinical psychologist by training, said many of the more concerning findings from the report spoke to the lower levels of health literacy among men.
“One in three men said they were confused or overwhelmed by health information that’s presented to them,” he told The Medical Republic.
“It’s obviously not an ideal situation if they’re not connecting with the messages that our health systems and services are putting out there.”
While GPs aren’t able to magically make men present earlier, Professor Rice said there was an opportunity for primary care doctors to encourage male patients to come in more often.
“Around 50% of men living in Australia think that it’s normal to ignore regular health checkups,” he said.
“I think GPs – when they do have men in front of them – can do everything that they can to normalise the fact that regular health checkups are important and that you’re not less of a man if you do take the step of getting a regular checkup.
“Indeed, it takes courage to push through any resistance … and that resistance might relate to expectations about how men relate to their health.”
Crucially, Professor Rice said, men and boys will often go for the “doorknob disclosure” on their way out of an appointment.
“It’s obviously really tricky in terms of the timeframe that GPs have, but wherever possible if they can welcome that [disclosure] and then say, ‘we really need to talk about this, but we can’t do it now’ … and do as much as possible to encourage that man to come back for another appointment,” he said.
“Women’s health and women in general do a really good job, often, of having much more long-standing health practitioner relationships, whereas many men don’t even have a regular GP.”
Suicide is the leading cause of death for men aged 15 to 44 in Australia and for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander men of all ages.
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“Irritability, anger or risk taking might be signs that something’s not going great … so part of thinking in a gender-responsive way for men is about making sure that we think about the ways in which boys and men are socialised … and that when it comes to mental health, we might see some differences in the types of presentations,” Professor Rice said.
In terms of policy changes, Movember called for more funding to go toward research, men’s health literacy and upskilling the health workforce.
Chief among the health workforce recommendations is to expand the Movember-run men’s health training and education resources hub for GPs.
Others included investing in career pathways for men’s health peer facilitators and building “gender competencies” into learning outcomes for university programs.
