Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England

Wes Streeting Excerpts

Wednesday 15th April 2026 Written Statements

[The Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Wes Streeting)]

Today the Government are publishing the renewed women’s health strategy for England. The health system is failing women across the country. This strategy will tackle medical misogyny and give greater choice, voice and power to women. This ambitious strategy renewal is made possible by the record £26 billion in funding for the NHS, secured by the UK’s first female Chancellor.

Women across England have repeatedly told us the same stories: that their symptoms are dismissed, their pain normalised, their concerns not believed, and that their voices carry too little weight in decisions about their own care. These experiences are not isolated or incidental. They reflect a healthcare system that has not been designed around women’s needs. That failure to listen has contributed directly to worsening outcomes, poorer experiences and widening inequalities.

The consequences are clear. Women are living longer but spending more of their lives in poor health. Many face long waits for gynaecology services, repeated appointments without answers, delayed diagnosis of conditions such as endometriosis, and avoidable pain during procedures. These failures are felt most acutely by women living in deprivation, disabled women, and by women from some ethnic minority backgrounds, who are least likely to be heard and most likely to experience harm as a result.

The previous Government first published its women’s health strategy in 2022. This plan was underpinned by substantial engagement, including almost 100,000 individual responses and over 400 submissions from organisations and experts to a call for evidence. Those submissions starkly demonstrated the many ways in which we have a health service that is not built for women.

However, its actions have not translated into meaningful improvements in women’s access, quality of care, experience or outcomes—or reductions in inequalities. This renewed strategy is our response to that failure. It recognises that this approach did not deliver for women, and sets out how change will happen through more fundamental reform as we deliver the 10-year health plan.

Through this strategy we will ensure our NHS transformation delivers for women: the community shift, with new neighbourhood women’s health services enabling faster diagnosis and treatment; the digital shift, with women’s health pathways prioritised in NHS Online; and the prevention shift, seizing opportunities from genomics to help manage lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancer as well as major conditions like cardiovascular disease. These reforms will be underpinned by a new diverse and devolved operating model with women’s voices and choices at its heart, including rolling out patient-reported outcome and experience data in core women’s health pathways. This transformation will be bolstered by our focus on research and innovation. Through the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the Government are funding research into areas of unmet need for women’s health—including to improve care for young women living with intense period pain, and first of its kind technology to treat threatened miscarriage. The NIHR is also embedding new sex and gender policies into health research, so that findings are genuinely representative and no woman is left behind by science.

We set out clear accountability for delivery and will be transparent on progress in improving women’s services, outcomes and experience. An overall metric against which we will judge progress is to improve healthy life expectancy in the poorest parts of the country to at least 61 years, delivering our commitment to halving the gap in healthy life expectancy between the richest and poorest regions, while increasing it for everyone. Other improvements will start immediately and continue over the next 10 years including:

shorter waits for gynaecology care,

fewer painful procedures without informed consent or a choice of pain relief,

easier access to contraception and screening close to home,

better information and more control over their health through digital services,

being listened to and taken seriously at the first time of asking,

more digital therapeutics bespoke to women,

more women in life science and tech leadership.

Women’s voices are the foundation of this strategy. This Government have listened to what women want and need. The renewed women’s health strategy puts the 10-year health plan’s new care model into action to deliver faster, tangible improvements across four outcomes that matter most to women across England. The renewed strategy sets out how the Government will:

make women’s voices and choices central in healthcare: investing in new ways for women’s voices to be heard and acted upon throughout the NHS including action to tackle outdated and misogynistic practices around pain relief and a new trial in gynaecology services which would vary the amount NHS trusts are reimbursed depending on women’s feedback on their experiences, including pain management.

transform NHS performance in services that matter most to women: women will be directed to the right professional first time, along with marrying redesigned local services with online support to cut waiting lists and ensure women no longer face years-long waits for diagnosis and treatment for conditions like endometriosis.

support all women to lead healthy, prosperous lives including a new programme to improve education for girls about their menstrual health, and expanding access to musculoskeletal hubs in the community, supporting long-term health and tackling a major driver of health-related economic inactivity.

create an approach to research and development that works for and empowers women, including launching a Femtech challenge fund to accelerate adoption of innovations that could transform women’s healthcare and an accelerator for female founders with innovations addressing women’s health priorities.

This marks a decisive shift from identifying problems to delivering change. By listening to women’s voices, improving performance where it matters most, and tackling the drivers of poor health and inequality, we will ensure women and girls receive the care, respect and outcomes they deserve.

This work builds on the Government’s action to reform women’s health, including free emergency contraception in pharmacies, at-home HPV testing kits, gynaecology as the first specialty for NHS Online and the introduction of bereavement leave for miscarriage. From this year, the standard NHS health check offered to all adults aged 40 to 74 will also include a question about menopause symptoms, giving up to 5 million women an easier route to advice and support.

[HCWS1517]