The renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England has been published, making a series of commitments to promoting women’s health and empowering women with a stronger say in their care, utilising digital tools to improve access, control, and care pathways for women’s health conditions.
Sue Mann, NHS England clinical director for women’s health, notes that although we have come “a long way” over the last decade, many women are still dismissed for symptoms that have an impact on their everyday lives, adding: “The renewed Women’s Health Strategy will build significantly on the work the NHS has been doing to ensure women are heard and get the specialist care they need – with a focus on bringing down waiting times, delivering more care in communities and giving women more choice over their care.”
The strategy promises “immediate” change, represented by shorter waits for gynaecology care, easier access to contraception and screening closer to home, better information and more control over health through digital services, and more digital therapeutics bespoke to women. Menstrual and menopause-related problems will be prioritised as two of the first nine pathways established under the new virtual hospital NHS Online, and the NHS App will offer flexibility on appointment booking and communication with care professionals. Digital health assistants will also reportedly be able to support women with ordering contraception from home, and the new National HealthTech Access Programme will streamline the adoption of innovations in areas such as cancer diagnostics and digital therapeutics for menopause.
Commitments under the renewed strategy are to make women’s voices and choices central in healthcare, and transforming NHS performance in services that matter most to women, with women to be prioritised in the creation and use of new indicators such as patient-reported outcome and experience measures. A women’s voices partnership will be established in 2027 to offer a new space for organisations representing women to inform national decision making, and outpatient services will be reformed toward digital-first pathways and the neighbourhood health model. Investment will also be made in digital tools to tackle rising obesity rates.
A renewed focus will also be placed on the collection of data on women’s voices, “embedding new approaches so that women’s voices resonate from ward to board”, integrating sources of data so women’s reported experiences and outcomes form a fundamental part of NHS data and performance information. PREMs and PROMs will be implemented prioritising key women’s health pathways, starting with gynaecological outpatient procedures, and a new PREM for maternity care will be launched this year. The GP Patient Survey will be updated to include a specific focus on women’s experiences, My Choices through the NHS App will empower women to choose their care providers more easily, and the NHS App’s HealthStore will support access to digital health technologies for women’s health and mental health.
DHSC notes the Single Patient Record will be made accessible via the NHS App by 2028, bringing together medical records, allowing women to view their health history and risk factors from within the app, and eventually informing personalised health coaching. A unified genomic record integrating genomic data with clinical and diagnostic data will be linked to the Single Patient Record, so patients can view their risk of major conditions and manage their personal health risks from the NHS App.
As far as research and innovation, a new FemTech healthcare challenge will be launched in the next two years with a budget of £1.5 million to accelerate the development of innovations that benefit women’s health. An accelerator for female founders with innovations addressing women’s health priorities will also be established within the next year, offering funding and support, market testing and access, and scale-up and commercialisation models. A new cloud-based AI research screening platform will enable NHS trusts to join AI trials, and the first use of the new platform has seen almost 700,000 women sign up to take part in a study on breast cancer.
Wider trend: Digital in supporting women’s health
The Scottish government has shared how the objectives set out in its Women’s Health Plan for Scotland are to be achieved across two phases. The first phase sets out priority areas to: ensure women have access to specialist menopause services for advice and support on the diagnosis and management of menopause; access to information for girls and women on menstrual health and management options; access for women to appropriate support, speedy diagnosis and best treatment for endometriosis; access to abortion and contraception services; rapid and easily accessible postnatal contraception; and to reduce inequalities in health outcomes for women’s general health, including work on cardiac disease. Phase two prioritises innovation and better data in supporting access to care for women and girls, with the government committing to working collaboratively with partners across academia, industry, and the third sector to identify opportunities to transform care.
US-based women’s telehealth company, Midi Health, has reportedly raised $100million in Series D funding, bringing its total valuation to $1billion. “This is validation for the movement we’re leading to provide women better healthcare,” said Joanna Strober, co-founder and chief executive officer of Midi Health. “Women’s health has been treated like an afterthought for too long. This funding gives us the resources to rewrite that story at scale.” Launched to tackle gaps in women’s healthcare, Midi has now expanded to become a scalable health platform offering insurance coverage to more than 45 million women, the company shares. With in excess of 25,000 patients looking for integrated care each week, it now relies on its proprietary AI engine to help with personalisation, streamlining of operations, and using health data to further research.
Augmented reality technology is being used at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust to help patients and clinicians visualise women’s health conditions such as endometriosis and prepare for surgical excision. The technology offers a large-scale, close-up view of anatomically precise 3D models, aiding clinicians in explaining diagnoses or disease progression to patients, and improving understanding of complex women’s health conditions like deep infiltrating endometriosis and uterine fibroids. Clinicians are able to interact with the model from their computer, enlarging specific regions to show disease impact, and illustrating precisely where areas of endometriosis will be excised during surgery.
