Women’s Health Strategy

Kirsteen Sullivan Excerpts

Thursday 16th April 2026 Commons Chamber

[Karin Smyth]

As we know, and as is documented in the strategy, there is sadly a long list of issues that particularly affect women that have been ignored, and it has taken far too long for women to draw attention to those issues. I understand that my hon. Friend the Minister for patient safety has met DES campaigners, and we will continue to listen to and learn from their experiences as we develop the strategy.

[Kirsteen Sullivan (Bathgate and Linlithgow) (Lab/Co-op)]

As chair of the all-party parliamentary group on endometriosis, I thank the ministerial team and my honourable Friend in the other place, Baroness Merron, for the focus that they have placed on that condition in the strategy, and for putting women’s voices front and centre; too often, they have been ignored. I also commend the sterling efforts and work of the late Sir David Amess and my right hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Anna Turley) to establish the APPG in 2019 and put endometriosis firmly on the parliamentary agenda. I am delighted that a new programme to improve menstrual health education for girls is included in the strategy, but does the Minister agree that there must also be menstrual health education for all clinicians, so that symptoms can be recognised at the earliest opportunity, and women and girls can get the care they need, when they need it?

[Karin Smyth]

Again, I put on record my respect and thanks to Sir David Amess and my right hon. Friend the Member for Redcar for the work that they started. I could not remember the exact year—I thought it was 2017, but my hon. Friend says that it was 2019. They raised awareness of what was a taboo only a few years ago. Many of us, including me, accepted it as normal to feel pain, whatever we did. Now, we are saying—that includes clinicians—that it is not normal. We look forward to joining in the great work that my hon. Friend and others are doing to make sure that this strategy becomes a reality, and that women see that happen very quickly.