Mission-Driven Innovation

Closing the Gender Health Gap in Defence with H4MOD

By Dr Julie Greeves, Professor of Applied Physiology, Head of Army Health and Performance Research

A Strong Start

In my role as Head of Army Health and Performance Research, I came across a challenge that I couldn’t quite put down. It’s a known fact that women serving in intense, stressful environments suffer from menstrual disturbances. However, Defence lacks the data and awareness to track this phenomenon and so struggles to support women in the most arduous roles, such as Close Combat Ground (CCG). The long-term risk of this problem, if left untreated, is increasing discomfort for women and potential musculoskeletal injuries. With limited resources, I didn’t have the capacity to delve into this issue on my own.

Enter H4MOD, a 10-week innovation sprint where student teams learn and apply the Lean Startup methodology to tackle Defence’s most critical challenges, with the hopes of providing evidence-based solution ideas. I submitted my problem to a team of International Relations students at Loughborough University and spoke to them of the importance of this challenge: we want Army women to operate at maximum performance and addressing this problem is part of the toolkit to achieve this.

Peak Performance

Immediately the team got to work, assessing my problem’s desirability, feasibility and viability with stakeholders to come up with a usable solution. I’ll admit, I came into the course with a pre-conceived solution idea in mind, but was thrilled to see the student team taking the time to explore the problem area before addressing any solution. What really impressed me was the breadth of people the team spoke to, from women in CCG roles to other servicewomen across different ranks and clinicians with specialisms in female healthcare. The students never lost sight of the bigger picture, asked all the right questions, and engaged consistently and professionally. As they went progressed, the students reframed the issue from an awareness and empowerment lens, asking: “How can we help women identify, track, and understand their menstrual cycles and symptoms in a way that enhances their operational readiness?”

Through-life Achievements

After an impressive number of interviews, the students took the information gained to the Army Cyber team to explore the internal challenges of an app-based solution that not only addressed symptoms, but also provided a menstrual health ‘risk rating’ for women that factored in stress levels, field exercise, etc. The students realised that there was a point in Army Phase 1 training where female recruits would benefit early in a career by tracking any new symptoms through the mobile-based app. These trends in servicewomen’s menstrual cycles could be followed throughout their career in the Army, potentially painting a picture of women’s health from the onset to the close of their military careers. Having that powerful population-based data on women’s health would be a game-changer in the longer term.

The Problem’s Importance

This problem is so impactful for Army Health as it relates to peak human performance and closing the gender health and performance data gap, which is significant in many military contexts. The Army’s overall objective is to ensure that servicepeople are fit and healthy enough to operate at peak fighting power, and by addressing the challenges of menstruation in arduous roles, we are firstly recognising the role that menstruation plays in enabling human performance, and, secondly, providing women a safe environment that they can thrive in.

For me, the best part of the course was the real diversity of thought provided by students without any background in Defence or human performance. Their out-of-the-box thinking was so refreshing in an area that demands to be supported.

H4MOD provided me with a dedicated resource to tackle a critical problem in only 3 months. There is no way I would have had the capacity to do this otherwise. It was a small investment of my time for a significantly useful and feasible solution idea, one which I’ve formed an exploitation working group around to help take things forward.

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