Our response to the Government’s Renewed Women’s Health Strategy
A strategy built for structural change. Now let's make sure it reaches everyone.
Health Equality Foundation responds to the Renewed Women's Health Strategy for England
The Health Equality Foundation warmly welcomes the Renewed Women's Health Strategy for England. For the first time, women's health sits within a programme of genuine transformation: neighbourhood-based care, funding tied to patient experience, services redesigned around how women actually live. That is the right level of ambition, pinpointing the true causes of the problem and taking concrete action to resolve them.
Fundamentally, the health system as it currently stands was not designed around women. The assumptions embed how services are built, how clinicians are trained, and which conditions receive research funding have proved remarkably resistant to change. Our own research found that 53% of women say a healthcare professional has dismissed or downplayed their symptoms, compared with 33% of men. That gap does not arise from individual clinical failures. It is a system behaving as designed. This Strategy is the most serious attempt yet to redesign it – and with patient voice as a central pillar, it has a credible mechanism to do so.
The Strategy also recognises something central to HEF's work: that inequalities in women’s healthcare are layered and compounding. Black women are disproportionately affected by conditions including fibroids and pre-eclampsia and face greater barriers to timely care. Women in deprived areas carry additional obstacles to accessing services, from transport and digital access to time away from work. The Strategy's whole-system, life course approach, its healthy life expectancy targets for the most deprived regions, and its first-ever mapping of LARC prescribing against deprivation all reflect an understanding that these inequalities are structural, not incidental. That is the right starting point.
Patient voice as the right mechanism, for all women
At the heart of the Strategy is a commitment to wire women's experiences into how services are held to account, not simply collect them. Linking NHS trust reimbursement to women's feedback, developing patient-reported outcome measures across women's health pathways, appointing a national director of patient experience: these are meaningful mechanisms. As an organisation whose work is centred on patient voice, we welcome them.
The focus now must be to ensure that this mechanism is designed to reach all women. A patient voice mechanism is only as good as whose voice it captures, and the women with the worst health outcomes are often the hardest to reach and the least likely to feed back through standard channels. What we will be pressing for is that same commitment to inclusion carried through into every aspect of implementation, so that the voices shaping services are genuinely representative of the women those services most need to reach.
Community spaces that work for the women who need them most
The Strategy's commitment to dedicated women's health spaces within neighbourhood health centres reflects precisely the kind of community-based model our research shows women want. But the opportunity will be missed if these spaces are not built as genuine one-stop shops: with on-site diagnostic facilities including ultrasound, blood testing, and other essential imaging, so that women receive a diagnosis and a treatment pathway in a single visit rather than a referral into an already overstretched system.
Location and resourcing matter as much as design. A neighbourhood health centre planned without reference to deprivation data will not close the gaps this Strategy identifies. The women in low socioeconomic areas who already face the longest waits and the furthest distances must be at the centre of commissioning decisions, not accommodated within them.
Digital pathways that bring more women in
Investment in digital pathways is a crucial and welcome step in expanding access to health services, and growing NHS App provision and online services could meaningfully improve reach for many women. The next step is ensuring that a digital inclusion approach sits alongside this investment. The women with the worst health outcomes are often those with the least reliable digital access, and a strategy serious about reaching them will design for that from the outset, through supported access, in-person alternatives, and community-based navigation, rather than addressing inclusion once the infrastructure is already in place. HEF looks forward to working with partners to embed digital inclusion standards across all new digital provision, so that innovation in access genuinely extends to the women who need it most.
Our commitment
This Strategy creates real opportunities to contribute, and we intend to take them. We look forward to working with Government, NHS England and Integrated Care Systems as implementation begins, and to developing the work that can best support that process.
The ambition in this document is significant. The assumptions driving unequal outcomes in women's health can be named, challenged and changed, and this Strategy takes meaningful steps towards that. Implemented well, it has the potential to transform the everyday experiences of millions of women. We are committed to playing our part in making sure it goes the distance.