I am not a health expert. I want to say that upfront, because it matters to how I built what I built.
Two years ago I was sitting in a gynaecologist’s office holding the results of an internal exam I had paid a lot of money for. The specialist had not looked at me once. Did not know my name. Was reading the screen when she said, “we’ll just book you in for surgery.”
I asked what she meant. Was something wrong. She told me no, it looked benign, but it was better to be safe than sorry.
That was the moment I stopped trusting that the system would work it out for me. I had gone to my GP with symptoms. She had done what she could, then referred me on. By the time I reached the specialist, I was a set of test results on a screen, not a person with questions. Nobody was engaging with what was actually happening to me, or what my options were.
So I went looking for myself. I searched locally. I read reviews. I found a Facebook group with over thirty thousand members, all trading advice, all trying to work out the same thing I was: who actually understands menopause, and who has simply added it to a list of services. It was confusing. And even when a name came up as good, there was often a six to eight month wait for an appointment.
I have spent twenty years building websites and working in strategy and consulting, not medicine. So I did what I know how to do. I built the resource I wished I had. That was the beginning of Menopause Resource Hub, a directory of vetted, menopause-informed practitioners across Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.
Today, that gap I found myself in has a new layer of relevance. The federal government has expanded perimenopause and menopause care into all 33 Endometriosis and Pelvic Pain Clinics nationally, backed by $37 million in investment. Medicare item 695 now funds a longer GP consultation specifically for menopause and perimenopause. This sits on top of a National Menopause and Perimenopause Awareness Campaign and a Senate Inquiry that made it clear something needed to change.
This is real and it is welcome. But funding a front door does not tell you what is behind it.
A GP told me once that most doctors are trained for sicknesses, and menopause is not a sickness. It is a transition. I think about that a lot.
Government investment can get a woman into a room. It cannot guarantee the person in that room has had the training to actually help her once she’s there. So women are still doing what I did: filtering advice from Facebook groups, being disappointed by generalist care, then eventually finding someone who is genuinely focused on this life stage and realising how different that conversation feels. That is the gap between policy and trust. One moves by announcement. The other is earned appointment by appointment.
It is also not only a GP problem. A woman navigating this might need a pelvic floor physiotherapist, a dietitian who understands hormonal change, a personal trainer who knows what midlife bodies are doing, a chiropractor, a counsellor. Vetting, for me, is not about credentialing a single profession. It is checking that whoever it is, in whatever discipline, is properly qualified in their own lane and is not straying into territory they have no business being in.
I do not run the Hub as an expert. I run it as what I have started calling a bridge builder. There are wonderful practitioners doing brilliant work in their own small corners of this space, largely unconnected to each other. And there are women out there who do not know how to find them, or who to trust when they do. My job is to build the bridge between those two groups, not to stand on either side of it pretending to be something I am not.
What I would like women reading this to take from it is not a call for more policy. It is a call to become the captain of their own health. To not accept the first piece of advice, or the first rejection, as the end of the conversation. To understand that this stage of life is not one symptom to be medicated away. It is closer to a second adolescence, a genuine, whole-of-body transition, the way puberty was the first time round. It deserves to be met with the same seriousness and curiosity, not a single prescription and a rushed goodbye.
I am optimistic. Australia has lagged behind the US and the UK, where women have been publishing, podcasting and researching this stage of life publicly for years, and where that openness has put more power into women’s own hands to understand their bodies. We are only starting to catch up. But the search numbers tell their own story. Women are actively looking for help right now, in greater numbers than ever.
I built Menopause Resource Hub before this funding existed, because women needed somewhere to start regardless of what government did or did not do. That has not changed. What I am trying to build is a place a woman can return to for as long as she needs it, whether that is months or years, whether the right practitioner is local or a telehealth appointment away. Menopause does not run to a fixed timeline, and neither should the support around it.