Women's Health Information

Although responsible for providing health information to the public, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) lacks an overall strategy for delivering such information to women. GAO has focused on six conditions that are of particular concern to women who are middle age and older--heart disease, breast cancer, osteoporosis, menopause, hormone replacement therapy, and urinary incontinence--and has discovered that HHS has no plans for ensuring that the most needed and useful information reaches the public. Instead, information campaigns are left to the discretion of HHS's Public Health Service agencies, which operate largely independently of each other. Even when information for the public is produced and distributed, it is not always easily accessible. In contacting local Public Health Service offices, GAO obtained requested information or a referral phone number only about half the time. Moreover, HHS does not routinely evaluate the usefulness of the information produced and has no way of knowing whether it is being targeted to the women who need it most.