Refreshing The Women’s Health Narrative

This month, the Government launched a renewed Women’s Health Strategy, setting out how it plans to improve women’s health and healthcare over the next decade. Building on earlier work, the updated strategy places a stronger emphasis on listening to women’s experiences and responding to their needs.

The reality is that our health system was not originally designed with women in mind. Years of chronic underfunding, combined with the impact of the Covid pandemic, have brought this into sharper focus. 

Put simply, women’s needs have been overlooked for far too long, creating gaps in care that this renewed strategy now seeks to address.

Health inequality is not a side issue; while it is often framed as a challenge within the NHS, it is, in fact, rooted more deeply in how health and society intersect.

For many women, healthcare decisions are shaped by trade-offs. We are often choosing between imperfect options rather than being offered the best possible care. Women frequently manage reproductive health, mental health, and long-term conditions simultaneously, yet these complexities are rarely met with holistic, joined-up support.

In the conversations following the Government’s announcement, one moment stood out to me - an interview on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. A senior leader in reproductive health spoke about the importance of listening to women and acting on their experiences. That felt right.

But there was something else, a repeated reference to women’s health as ‘complicated’ that made me pause. Are women’s bodies inherently complicated? Are the key life stages that most women experience - menstruation, pregnancy, menopause - ‘complex’? And if so, what are we measuring that against?

If the baseline is the male body, then perhaps that’s part of the issue. Women’s health is often framed as a deviation from the norm, rather than a norm in its own right.

Yes, these life stages are under-researched and often poorly supported by fragmented, unjoined care. But does that make them inherently complex, or does it reflect a system that hasn’t been designed to understand or support them properly?

Do we really think of periods as complex medical conditions? Or have we simply been conditioned to accept risk, discomfort, and gaps in care as normal?

Maybe the way we talk about women’s health reveals something deeper: that, consciously or not, we are still using men as the baseline for what ‘good’ looks like in healthcare.

What is clear is that women’s health needs to shift from reactive attention to proactive prioritisation across research, funding, and care design. And importantly, that means treating women not as a deviation, but as a baseline.

True equity often starts with language. The way we talk about women’s health shapes how it is understood, prioritised, and delivered.

Let’s call it what it is: the issue is the system, not women’s bodies.