Women’s Health

Helena Dollimore Excerpts

Thursday 27th February 2025 Westminster Hall

[Helena Dollimore (Hastings and Rye) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered women’s health.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Dr Huq.

“Women’s pain is too often dismissed, recorded as emotional, misunderstood and misdiagnosed. It’s got to change.”

Those are the words of my friend, Professor Geeta Nargund—an expert in women’s health, who joins us today. They sum up well the issues that we are here to talk about.

Ahead of today’s debate, the House of Commons put out a public call for evidence. We have been overwhelmed by more than 800 responses in just a few days, which shows the strength of feeling on this matter and how much women in this country want to see more focus on and prioritisation for women’s health.

Although I will focus my comments today on the state of women’s health in this country, it is worth putting on the record our concern for the awful situation that many women around the world find themselves in. I will never forget seeing the maternity theatre run by Save the Children in Yemen, where women gave birth between airstrikes. In many parts of the world, women struggle to access the most basic care and the most basic of reproductive rights and healthcare. The struggle for better women’s health does not stop at our borders.

We have heard stories from women up and down this country of not being believed, not getting diagnosed and then having difficulties obtaining treatment when they do finally get that diagnosis. Before coming on to some of the specific areas of women’s health that need to be addressed, I want to highlight the underlying themes that are too common in so many of these cases. For too long, women have had to fight to be believed and to be taken seriously, which can result in them losing their jobs. Their relationships, mental health and wellbeing can be affected. So many women have got in touch to share their stories of going through endless appointments and referrals in search of a diagnosis. During the long waits, women wait needlessly in pain and in huge suffering. For some, sadly, the long wait has proved fatal.

As this Labour Government take welcome action to tackle long gynaecological waiting lists, we are committed to improving inequalities in many areas of women’s health. It is worth pointing out that if we lined up the number of women currently stuck on the hugely long gynaecological waiting lists in this country, that line would stretch from London all the way to Exeter. What a shocking indictment of 14 years of Conservative failure!

In their submissions, several women shared their stories of having their symptoms dismissed by doctors or clinicians as being simply due to hormones, or even as having been imagined, only for the real diagnosis of a very serious rare cancer to come later on. I share one story of my friend—the late, great, Baroness Margaret McDonagh. Margaret attended her GP on several occasions complaining of painful headaches, but they were dismissed by her GP time and again as being related to her hormones. Tragically, Margaret was later diagnosed with a brain tumour, a glioblastoma. We all wish that it had been caught earlier; Margaret could still be with us today.

Anyone who knew Margaret will be aware of what a force of nature she was. It shows the scale of the issues facing women in accessing healthcare that even she was dismissed. We have heard similar stories from women eventually diagnosed with ovarian cancer and blood cancer, with the delayed diagnosis damaging their chance of successful curative treatment.

Many women eventually diagnosed with endometriosis shared similar stories. In its 2024 report of over 4,000 women who had received a diagnosis, the charity Endometriosis UK found that almost half of the women had visited their GP 10 or more times before receiving a diagnosis. Some 70% had visited over five times and 20% reported seeing a gynaecologist 10 or more times before getting a diagnosis.

Another common barrier for women is the lack of research and data about women’s health. We have all been made familiar with the gender data gap and the consequences for policymaking by Caroline Criado Perez’s excellent book “Invisible Women”. The gender health gap is stark. The Women and Equalities Committee report published in December said:

“past research has shown that five times more research is conducted into erectile dysfunction than premenstrual syndrome. This is staggering considering that 19% of men are affected by erectile dysfunction, while 90% of women have premenstrual syndrome.”

Over-the-counter Viagra was available a full six years before chemists in this country were able to provide medicine over the counter for urinary tract infections.

It is clear that far more attention and focus needs to be given to women’s menstrual cycles and treatment for conditions related to them, including the menopause. Why is it that in over a decade of being at school in this country, I learned all about many obscure topics like oxbow lakes, but never about the menopause, which affects 51% of our population? Everyone will be affected by it, whether they experience it as a woman or their mother, daughter or wife does.

We are rightly seeing more focus given to the menopause thanks to the work of many campaigners. I want to give particular mention to my hon. Friend the Member for Neath and Swansea East (Carolyn Harris) for her championing of the cause. She and many others have rightly highlighted the shocking delays for women in accessing hormone replacement therapy treatment— a medicine that plays a critical role in alleviating the symptoms of the menopause, helping millions of women in the UK manage what is a natural life transition.

One of my constituents, Kate, wrote to me to describe her struggle to access adequate treatment for the pain that she has been suffering and how she was not taken seriously by medical professionals. She says:

“At one point, I was experiencing such a high level of pain…that I was sent by the GP to A&E with suspected appendicitis. After tests confirmed what I’d said all along”—

that it was endometriosis—

“I was ‘confronted’ by a doctor…who demanded to know why I was there, and what I thought they should do to help me. When I said that I’d been clear that I thought it was related to endometriosis the whole time, she dismissed me and said ‘we don’t deal with menstrual issues in A&E’. I left in tears and pain and have since avoided A&E despite experiencing acute pain”.

Another area of great importance in this debate is maternity services. I recently had the chance to visit my local maternity unit at the Conquest hospital in Hastings and see the fantastic care that local midwives are giving women. Midwives are working really hard and have our full support. We need to ensure that we are doing everything we can to tackle the retention crisis in midwifery and encourage more young people to enter the profession. We have heard harrowing evidence in the numerous reviews commissioned into maternity services at a number of hospital trusts of the same mistakes being made over and over again and lessons not being learned, with tragic consequences of women and babies losing their lives or experiencing traumatic births. That has to change.

The landmark report of the all-party parliamentary group on birth trauma in the previous Parliament set out for the first time the shocking impact that traumatic births have had on women and their families and what needs to change to prevent that. Often, those tragic cases were a result of an unhealthy obsession in maternity units with not intervening. I must point out to the House how damaging that obsession has been for many women. The report made many important recommendations and I hope that the Government will look closely at them.

I pay tribute to those in that all-party group in the previous Parliament for the work that went into that report and to the women who shared their stories, and to all the women that have shared their stories as part of the House of Commons call for evidence. We have looked through all of them, and I know that many Members will be sharing stories about their own constituents’ experiences.

It is also worth pointing out that some examples of brilliant women’s healthcare have been shared as well. I want to particularly mention Dr Warner from the Rye medical centre in my constituency. She was mentioned by a number of women who got in touch with me who said she was a champion of women’s healthcare; as a result, a huge waiting list of women were waiting for appointments with her because word of mouth had spread about how she prioritised this issue.

Maternity services, of course, are not the only area in which shocking scandals have been exposed regarding women’s health. We will hear today from Members who have been campaigning for justice for the women who were victims of the mesh and sodium valproate scandals. We have also heard a number of shocking stories from women, as part of their submissions, about an inability to access basic contraception, about long waits to access the healthcare that they have the right to access and about challenges in women’s mental health services.

Many Members wish to speak, so I will sum up by saying that it is clear that far more attention needs to be given to women’s health. I am looking forward to hearing the stories from other Members’ constituencies and how this Labour Government will be working to ensure that women get the support and treatment that they have the right to.

[Several hon. Members rose—]