Our Work

The Women’s Heart Alliance was founded in 2014 with a mission to prevent women from needlessly facing and dying from heart disease and stroke.

Building a movement to demand change requires all of us to join forces. We’re working with policymakers, local communities and medical experts with the shared vision of heart equity. We’ve brought our message to the halls of Congress, college campuses and scientific conferences and shared it across the Internet. But we still have more to do.

Our efforts include advocating for real public policy change to promote heart equity, taking action that improves women’s heart health and raising awareness among women about cardiovascular disease.

Advocacy

We’re informing policymakers about the importance of sex-specific research and existing inequities in women’s cardiovascular health.

Priorities

  • Encouraging women’s full representation in biomedical studies and clinical trials and boosting understanding of why there are differences between women’s and men’s  heart disease.
  • Increasing National Institutes of Health funding to improve heart disease research, prevention and treatment.
  • Furthering the national dialogue on women and heart disease, including the  economic implications and cost burden for the nation.

Highlights

  • Educating the 116th Congress on the women’s heart health epidemic— see our recent letter to Members of Congress. Collaborating with policy thought leaders to ensure the inclusion of women and heart disease as an area of study in a Department of Defense program that funds critical research.
  • Building our Scientific Advisory Board to include more than 30 of the country’s top cardiologists and medical professionals who represent 18 states.
  • Joining the Clinical Trials Transformation Initiative to help shape policies, including recruitment and analysis of clinical trials in 2016.
  • Presenting WHA’s groundbreaking 2014 survey of women and physicians, which identified alarming knowledge gaps regarding women’s heart disease, at the American Heart Association Scientific Sessions.

Action

We empower women to take their heart health into their own hands, first by ensuring women can access support, and that every health care provider knows how to provide it.

Highlights

  • Launching the Cities and Communities with Heart Initiative in Nashville, Tennessee, to catalyze change in women’s heart health. With local stakeholders, we designed activities that addressed women’s cardiovascular disease, ranging from college campus screening initiatives to a program aimed at reducing heart disease risk among nurses in Nashville’s hospitals and health systems.
  • Commissioning a groundbreaking survey that underlined how few women are informed of their risk of heart disease and how few physicians feel well prepared to assess women’s risk.

Awareness

We raise awareness of women’s cardiovascular diseases through earned media efforts, social media outreach and educational opportunities.

Highlights

  • Launching “Fight the Ladykiller ® (FTLK)” — a nationwide campaign to build greater awareness and knowledge of the women’s heart health epidemic and the role sex differences play in research, prevention and care.
  • Participating in the 2015 Women in the World Summit’s panel discussion.
  • Teaming up with the Surgeon General in 2016 to spotlight women’s heart health at a Golden State Warriors basketball game.
  • Presenting at Fortune’s 2016 Most Powerful Women Summit.

WHA in the News

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