Whether you’re a woman or girl who knows this because the health service let you down, the health secretary who’s responsible for fixing the problem, or the former chief executive of the NHS, quoted above, this is a statement of observable fact not an opinion.
The government’s published today its ‘refreshed’ women’s health strategy.
The health secretary let the world know in summer last year that the previous government’s framework would get a rework by the new Labour administration.
There’s no doubt that as good as it is to have a strategy dedicated to women’s health – a multi generationally-neglected problem – the publication of the document three years ago hasn’t led to change on the scale that’s needed, and so ministers set about giving it a reboot.
It’s an open question as to whether what women need in their healthcare is a revised strategy, but to give ministers their due, it is helpful for minds to focus on a shared problem in a collective way.
The challenge from the first version of the strategy was not ambition but delivery.
Dedicated funding for new women’s health hubs – centres for women and girls to have community-led and dedicated care – failed to reach the frontline as intended and too few parts of the country are now served.
Similarly efforts to tackle longstanding inequalities in access, based on ethnicity, income and other facts outside of an individual woman’s direct control, have been inadequate: for example your chances of getting the right care are set not by your needs but by where you live.
This continues to be unacceptable.
The government has secured some good coverage today of its new-look plans, but there are already worries that although the strategy may be ‘refreshed’ the government risks repeating and compounding the mistakes of the first document from 2024.
Funding for new routes to care are welcome as is a commitment to ensure NHS services don’t get paid when care falls short in gynaecological care.
A commitment in the Telegraph by the health secretary to end the “odyssey” women face in getting diagnosed with endometriosis, is also important.
But do the commitments stand up to scrutiny?
The generous answer to this question is that the NHS is battling on multiple fronts, has received below-trend levels of investment for years and is being asked to deal with the fall-out from issues – social care, obesity, gambling addiction – that arguably it should not have to.
In this environment, it is perhaps welcome to see such a clear and co-ordinated focus on women’s health.
The more critical answer to the question is that the amounts of money and the lack of detail presented so far, simply mean that these commitments risk going the way of the promises from the previous strategy: investment swallowed by the drive to eliminate deficits and promises to prioritise women’s health appointments a victim of the enormous challenge of reducing overall elective lists.
Without more detail and without a commitment to ringfence funding, let alone say more on the potential of new digital approaches to care, then the government – and most importantly women and girls themselves – risk having yet another strategy that may state it wants women back at the heart of the NHS, but is unable to deliver on that promise.
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