The Government just released a new Women's Health strategy - this is what it means for you
Here’s what it means for you and PCOS
Hello everyone, I hope you’re doing well this week.
The UK government published its Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England at the beginning of this month and PCOS is mentioned.
It’s a 90-page policy document, and it is not exactly a light Sunday read. But buried in it are some things that are genuinely significant for those of us with PCOS and a few things that made me feel, cautiously, that the tide might be turning.
I want to walk you through the parts that are most relevant to us: what the document acknowledges, what it’s actually committing to, and where the gaps still are.
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In this newsletter:
Why the NHS has been failing women and what the data actually says
The specific mentions of PCOS and what’s changing in schools and services
What the gynaecology waiting list crisis means for you
The new research funding on women’s health, including PCOS
The hormones and mental health connection, the strategy finally names
What I think is worth being cautiously optimistic about
Why we needed a new strategy
Let’s start with the context, because it matters.
The UK dropped from 20th to 26th place (out of 38 OECD countries) in female life expectancy between 2000 and 2022.
Women in England now spend more of their lives in poor health than men, despite living longer. And more than 8 in 10 women have, at some point, felt unheard by a healthcare professional.
For those of us with PCOS, this will probably feel familiar.
Most of us have a story about a symptom that was dismissed, a GP appointment that left us feeling like the problem was us, not the system. The average time from first seeing a doctor to receiving an official endometriosis diagnosis in the UK is still around 9 years and 4 months, and while PCOS timelines vary, the pattern of delayed diagnosis and normalised symptoms is something many of us share.
The Secretary of State for Health describes the NHS as having:
“a problem with basic, everyday sexism and an appalling culture of medical misogyny.”
Those are strong words in an official government document. And while words alone don’t transform anything, the fact that this framing is now embedded in national policy is meaningful.
The strategy is an attempt to address it. Here are some top insights:
1. PCOS is now being named in school education, for the first time
The Department for Education published revised statutory guidance on relationships, sex, and health education in schools last year. For the first time, that guidance explicitly includes polycystic ovary syndrome as a topic that should be covered alongside menstrual health, premenstrual syndrome, heavy periods, and endometriosis.
The strategy builds on this by committing an additional £1 million to improve menstrual health education in schools and community settings, so that girls understand what “normal” actually looks like and, importantly, when to seek healthcare. I wish this were around when I was not getting my periods for months on end.
This matters because nobody ever told us that irregular periods, acne, or excess hair growth were anything more than bad luck. Earlier education creates earlier awareness, which leads to earlier diagnosis, which leads to earlier access to support. The compound effect of that, over a lifetime, is significant.
It won’t help those of us already in the system. But it matters for the next generation, and it suggests that PCOS is finally being positioned as a condition worth knowing about before you end up in a doctor’s office trying to explain yourself.
2. New research funding on PCOS
The strategy reveals that, through NIHR (the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the research funding arm of the Department of Health), the government has issued more than 20 new funding calls since July 2024 on women’s health topics. Among those explicitly named are assessments of new therapies for polycystic ovary syndrome.
What that will produce is a bit unclear at this stage. Research funding calls are the beginning of a long pipeline. But they are the beginning, and that is further along than we were.
The strategy also commits to an important structural change: from now on, NIHR will only fund research that appropriately considers sex-based differences. This matters because much of our existing understanding of conditions that affect women, including metabolic risk, cardiovascular disease, and medication effects, was built from trials that either excluded women or didn’t look at the data by sex. That gap in evidence has real consequences for clinical practice. Closing it won’t happen overnight, but the policy direction is clear.
3. FemTech is getting £1.5 million
For someone who has worked in digital health for my entire career, I am equally excited and disappointed in this one. They launching a FemTech healthcare challenge within 2 years with a pot of £1.5 million
On one hand, I am happy to see money allocated specifically to the FemTech founder space, as this creates an opportunity for innovation and an incentive for private investment to put more money into these start-ups.
On the other hand, this is very little money for the reality of VC-backed companies. For reference, a start-up that has been running for 2 years is expected to have £1.5 million in revenue already to access further investment.
Anna O'Sullivan from FutureFemHealth has done a deep dive into this specifically on PCOS which is worth reading if you are interested in the economic side of innovation and PCOS tech.
In addition, they will launch a new accelerator for female founders with innovations addressing women’s health priorities. Should I apply with Leya Health?
4. The Gynaecology Waiting List
Here’s the less comfortable part of the picture.
There are currently 565,000 women on the gynaecology waiting list in England. The average wait is 15 weeks — up from 6.4 weeks in 2018. Only 57% of gynaecology referrals are being seen within 18 weeks.
For those of us with PCOS navigating the referral system, whether for fertility investigations, ultrasounds, hormonal management, or related conditions, this is the reality we are working with.
The strategy does acknowledge this and has committed to reducing those waiting times. The plan is to shift the majority of gynaecology care out of hospitals and into primary care and community settings, including redesigned clinical pathways for heavy periods and a single point of access for gynaecology referrals. There is no mention of a PCOS-specific pathway, but hopefully we will see one in the near future.
One hypothesis here is that the “hospital or nothing” model has created bottlenecks, and that more women could be managed well and earlier in community settings. That may well be true. What remains to be seen is whether those community services will have the specialist knowledge to appropriately manage complex presentations like PCOS, where symptoms overlap with metabolic, reproductive, and dermatological systems.
The strategy also commits to publishing an equity good practice guide to help NHS systems better understand and reduce inequalities, specifically in heavy periods, a symptom that disproportionately affects women from ethnic minority backgrounds and those in the most deprived areas of England. It’s worth noting that PCOS prevalence and presentation vary by ethnicity, and that ethnic minority women have historically been underserved in this space.
5. The hormones and mental health link is finally mentioned
Something in the “conditions affecting women disproportionately” section caught my eye.
The strategy explicitly acknowledges “increasing recognition of the links between hormones and mental health, such as in conditions like premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD).”
For the PCOS community, this framing matters. We know that the hormonal landscape of PCOS is not just an ovarian thing. It has consequences for mood, anxiety, and energy levels beyond what we can imagine.
The strategy doesn’t say this directly in relation to PCOS, but the acknowledgement that hormones are relevant to mental health is a step towards a more integrated understanding of how reproductive endocrinology and psychological well-being interact. Maybe we will actually see a multi-disciplinary team approach to women’s health in the future (I assume in a lot of years).
Additionally, the strategy commits to improving mental health support for women and girls generally and acknowledges that around 1 in 4 women have a common mental health condition. For those of us with PCOS, where the evidence suggests elevated rates of anxiety and depression compared to the general female population, having mental health support genuinely embedded into women’s health pathways rather than treated as a separate referral would be pretty meaningful.
6. The NHS App and Digital Access
The product manager in me had to include this, as I believe the lack of data access among doctors makes our care so much worse.
The strategy places significant weight on digital transformation, and there are a few things worth knowing.
By 2028, a Single Patient Record will be accessible through the NHS App, bringing together all medical records. For those of us who have had to repeat our PCOS history, symptoms, and current medications to every new GP we see, which is exhausting and sometimes dangerous, this could reduce that friction meaningfully.
The NHS App will also offer personalised health coaching over time, and eventually integrate genomic risk data. Whether this will be developed in a way that is relevant to complex hormonal conditions like PCOS, rather than focusing solely on weight, remains to be seen.
What is already confirmed is that menstrual health problems will be among the first 9 pathways established in the new virtual hospital, NHS Online, launching in 2027. I am very disappointed PCOS is not explicitly named here, but menstrual disruption is one of its primary presentations, and there is reason to hope that, as these pathways are designed, PCOS will be incorporated into menstrual health workflows rather than siloed.
My thoughts
I want to be honest with you: this strategy is a policy commitment, not a guarantee of change. We’ve had Women’s Health Strategies before that didn’t translate into meaningful improvements in access, waiting times, or care quality. The document itself acknowledges this, describing the 2022 strategy as “set up to fail” because it operated within an outmoded care model. Whether those intentions survive contact with NHS commissioning reality is genuinely uncertain.
What I think is worth holding onto:
1. PCOS is now included in school education. That’s a first. If you know young people who are asking questions about their health, this is a shift in what they are likely to encounter in classrooms.
2. There is active NIHR research funding on PCOS therapies. If you are interested in participating in research, the strategy commits to making it easier to find and join relevant clinical trials through the NHS App. Worth keeping an eye on https://bepartofresearch.nihr.ac.uk/
3. The hormones-mental health connection is explicit. This creates space for those conversations to be treated as medically legitimate rather than subjective. Document it if you feel your mood or mental health is part of your hormonal picture — that framing now has policy backing.
What we still don’t have and what I think we should continue to advocate for is a specific, dedicated PCOS care pathway within the NHS. A condition affecting an estimated 1 in 10 women, with documented implications for metabolic health across the life course, deserves more than being absorbed into a general gynaecology referral queue.
That work isn’t done yet. But understanding the landscape we’re working in is, I think, always a better starting point than working in the dark.
See you next Sunday,
Francesca
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*We are all unique in our own ways so this information is for educational purposes only. In my communications, I summarise research data and bring in my own experience. This shouldn’t be viewed as medical advice at any point. Please further consult your healthcare provider about your health needs.*
Thanks for summarising all of this - really helpful overview!