Women’s Health Strategy

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[The Minister for Secondary Care (Karin Smyth)]

With permission, I will make a statement on the Government’s renewed women’s health strategy.

The NHS was founded on the principle of equality and the right care for everyone, whenever they need it, but there is no getting away from the fact that it has failed to live up to that founding promise. For too long, women have been left to navigate a confusing system, fighting to get the basic care they deserve, and under-represented in health research. Above all, women’s voices and choices have been dismissed, and it is truly shocking how often women have been ignored when telling medical professionals about their pain. From pelvic mesh to endometriosis, we are expected to put up with pain as our lot in life, as if it were normal. But it is not normal, and since coming into office this Government have taken a number of measures to improve women’s health.

We have taken action to bring down gynaecology waiting lists, introduced menopause questions into routine health checks, made the morning-after pill available for free at high street pharmacies, stood up a rapid and independent investigation into maternity services, and introduced Jess’s rule, so that GP teams have to “reflect, review and rethink” if a patient presents three times with the same or escalating symptoms.

The blunt reality is that the NHS is failing women and girls on even the most basic measures of healthcare. Indeed, we do not treat all women equally either. The wealthiest 10% of women live almost 10 years longer than the poorest 10%, while the most deprived spend over a third of their lives in bad health—something I see starkly in my constituency of Bristol South. Disabled women experience poorer outcomes, and we should recognise the additional disadvantage faced by black and Asian women, who face the double discrimination of racism and misogyny all at once.

Our renewed women’s health strategy will address those and other glaring injustices. It will give women and girls faster care from a health system that actually listens. It will make it simpler and faster for them to access the care they need the first time they ask for it, and it will make sure that the latest innovations work for women, ranging from reproductive and maternal health to menopause and chronic conditions. Of course, every day women are receiving outstanding, compassionate care from our dedicated NHS staff, but being ignored, gaslit, humiliated and disrespected are all-too-common experiences for far too many. More than eight women in 10 say there have been times when healthcare professionals did not listen to them. Our mission is to dismantle the culture and ingrained behaviours that allow that medical misogyny to fester and grow, and that starts by listening to women.

Women’s voices and choices are the golden thread that runs through this renewed strategy. Their voices will be heard, as we work to reduce variation in how GPs listen to and respond to women, using patient survey data in a quality improvement programme. Their voices will be heard as we capture whether women have been treated with respect, kept informed, and involved in decisions about their own care. Their voices will be heard, as we co-develop new standards of care for procedures such as hysteroscopy, so that every woman has informed consent and a real choice over her pain relief.

Yesterday, my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State announced that we will do the first trial of a scheme known as patient power payments, which will cover gynaecology services. Women will get a say on whether the NHS provider should get full payment for the services women receive, based on the quality of their experience. It means that if a woman is not happy with her experience, a portion of the tariff paid to that provider would be redirected to fund improvements in the same services instead. In other words, women will have the power to kick medical misogyny where it hurts: in the budget.

All this is building on the evidence and expertise that informed the original strategy. I wish to acknowledge the intended ambition of that work, not least because it was based on the contributions of thousands of women. However, the changes that were promised have not translated into consistent improvements in access, quality of care or outcomes. Take gynaecology services. The waiting list for gynae care was north of 600,000 when we took office. Today that figure is finally moving in the right direction, but we cannot make as much progress as we would like because the system simply was not designed with women in mind.

I pay tribute to Baroness Merron, who has led this work on behalf of the Government. As she made clear in her foreword, this system was not designed in such a way—to be fair to Nye Bevan, in 1948 he was largely thinking about working men who were dying early in their sixties from the awful consequences of poor work, with some support for maternity services. We need to change that. We will support integrated care boards to introduce a single point of access for all non-urgent referrals to gynaecology and women’s health services, to speed up access. We will redesign the most common clinical pathways for heavy periods, menopause and urogynaecology, to remove unnecessary delays. Women with fibroids and endometriosis will be listened to at first presentation. They will be seen faster, and offered clear information through our new virtual hospital, NHS Online.

Women’s health pathways are being prioritised in NHS Online, and menopause and menstrual health services will be among the first to go live when it becomes operational this year. There will be a relentless focus on reducing women’s pain, improving standards, and reducing variation in both procedural and chronic pain management, including for chronic pelvic pain. We will launch a new programme to help young girls grow up understanding their menstrual health and know when to seek help.

From gynaecology to pain relief, our renewed strategy takes forward the work of the previous Government, and goes further and faster to fill the holes they left. It has only been made possible by the record £26 billion in funding for the NHS that was secured by my right hon. Friend the Chancellor, the first woman to hold that office. All that will be underpinned by an NHS that finally listens with respect, dignity and compassion to the voices and choices of every woman and every girl, every time. That is not least with the creation of the women’s voices partnership, which is a new space for organisations representing women, giving them a direct line to Whitehall to inform national decision-making. The partnership will have a particular focus on those women who are most excluded from traditional services, and through it we will ensure that women’s voices help to shape the long-term direction of NHS reform.

Unlike the original strategy that was based on an outdated model of care, this renewed strategy maps across the three shifts in our 10-year plan for health. The shift from sickness to prevention will mean that women can better understand and act on their risk of conditions such as breast cancer and diabetes. The shift from hospital to community will mean services designed around women’s lives, with much faster access to diagnosis and treatment. The shift from analogue to digital will mean that women will avoid long waiting lists for painful conditions through NHS Online. Within two years we will launch a new challenge fund, backing the most promising women’s health technology start-ups, with a focus on tackling health inequalities in community settings. We are embedding new sex and gender policies into studies through the National Institute for Health and Care Research, so that findings are genuinely representative and no woman is left behind by science.

As every woman hearing this statement knows, to fully exercise power over our lives we need to be at the top of our game, both mentally and physically. We also know that women’s health has been neglected for too long. It therefore falls to this Government to restore the founding promise of our national health service, and to deliver the right care for everyone when they need it. From the classroom to the clinic, our renewed women’s health strategy promises a fairer, healthier future for women and girls everywhere, acting on women’s voices and choices, transforming NHS performance in services that matter most to women, supporting all women to live healthier lives, and creating an approach to research and development that works for and empowers women. We are designing the system to fit around women’s lives. This will not be a strategy that sits around gathering dust on a shelf, because women are counting on us, and we will not let them down.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the shadow Minister.

--- Later in debate ---

[Karin Smyth]

My hon. Friend is a fantastic champion in this area. We are so pleased to have her clinical experience and no day goes past without her representing her own speciality of physiotherapy and AHPs more generally. She is absolutely right that those professionals have led the way in looking at women’s care and it is important that women feel confident with that physiotherapy advice. I think that she will be pleased to see the developments that will come from the women’s health strategy and those that will come when we bring forward our workforce plan, which will have AHPs front and centre working in women’s neighbourhood healthcare.

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Caroline Nokes)]

I call the Liberal Democrat spokesperson.

[Dr Danny Chambers (Winchester) (LD)]

The Liberal Democrats welcome the strategy, and its specific recognition of the socioeconomic and racial disparities in women’s healthcare, which it is important to put front and centre. We also appreciate the specific recognition of endometriosis and similar conditions. My partner, Emma, suffers from endometriosis, and on many occasions I have seen her unable to stand up or barely get off the sofa, having been told for years that her symptoms are completely normal and that there is nothing wrong with her. Given that at least one in 10 women suffer from endometriosis and there are over 500,000 people on gynaecology waiting lists, clearly her experience is not unique.

The picture around maternity safety is deeply troubling. Maternal mortality has increased by over 20% in the past 15 years, and there have recently been some high-profile media discussions about women and babies being let down, sometimes with devastating consequences. That is why the Liberal Democrats have been calling for one-to-one midwifery care and specialist doctors on every unit.

I welcome the Government’s specific commitment on treatments for morning sickness. My hon. Friend the Member for Lewes (James MacCleary) has campaigned on that issue for a long time, and it is right that we end the postcode lottery for these medicines. The condition can be debilitating for some people, and it is not fair that women have different experiences simply because of where they live.

Given that this is not the first women’s health strategy to be brought to this place—the previous Government brought one through in 2022—and the fact that many women we speak to do not feel that there has been any meaningful change, a lot of people are saying that we cannot just keep announcing strategies while women are waiting for basic care. Given the failure of the last Government to deliver meaningful change, can we have reassurances that this will not simply be another strategy announcement and that women will feel a difference in the care that they receive?