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Good morning. Yesterday the Government launched a ten-year strategy addressing what the Health Secretary referred to as 'the entrenched' inequalities which mean that women are seriously disadvantaged in receiving the medical care they need. This disadvantage is partly explained by doctors' lack of knowledge and training in relation to women's particular health issues. It also has to do with a failure to prioritise the understanding and treatment of these problems. But in the consultation which preceded the publication of the report, many women said that they were simply not heard and had to push for the investigation which would lead to a diagnosis. On the Â鶹Éç website, one woman puts it sharply: 'let's face it you either have a vagina or a voice.' The story in the Gospels of Jesus curing a women with a chronic haemorrhage rather suggests that the less than ideal dynamics between women and medics have been around for a while. Jesus has been bidden by a local big man, Jairus by name, to come and heal his sick daughter - but while Jesus is on the way to the house, a women with this somewhat mysterious 12 year long medical condition, creeps up on Jesus from behind - in contrast to Jairus's direct approach - and surreptitiously touches his garment and is healed. Mark's Gospel is rather brutal about her experience to date with the medical profession - 'she had borne much agony under the care of many physicians and had spent all she had, but to no avail. Instead, her condition had only grown worse.' 12 years of agony, impoverished and no better for it - so, understandably perhaps, she seems to have lost faith in the power of her voice. But when the woman confesses the truth in response to Jesus's question to the crown, 'Who touched me?', Jesus has no word of criticism for her indirection but only tender admiration for her persistence and courage - 'daughter' he says (addressing no one else anywhere in the Gospels with that word), 'daughter, go in peace.' I have two smallish daughters - 8 and 6 years old - and I know that they will need to develop courage and determination if they are to make their voices heard, not only in the sphere of health. 'The entrenched inequalities' which Steve Barclay, the Health Secretary referred to, affect women's experience of health care but also of education, employment and housing and so on - and ironically of course, their experience in the church. Ironically because Jesus's engages with women throughout the Gospels, as he does with the long suffering women in the crowd, bringing her to the front, listening to her story, and taking her seriously. 'Historically' - says the strategy document - 'the health and care system has been designed by men, for men'. It's about time that observation was just about the past and not about the present.