Government unveils renewed women’s health plan to tackle NHS sexism

Women who have spent years being told their pain is normal are now at the centre of a renewed NHS plan that promises to link patient feedback to provider funding, speed access to gynaecology and set a new standard for pain relief during invasive procedures.

The Department of Health and Social Care, NHS England and Wes Streeting published the renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England on 15 April 2026, setting out 117 action points aimed at women’s and girls’ care. It includes a trial in which women’s feedback could influence provider funding and targeted improvements, a single referral point for gynaecology, faster access for conditions such as endometriosis and fibroids, and a new standard of care for pain relief. Streeting said the NHS has a problem with “basic, everyday sexism” and that the government wants to tackle “medical misogyny” by putting power “in the hands of patients.”

The central test is whether those promises change what happens at the bedside. The strategy says patient survey data will be used within two years to improve how GPs listen and respond to women, while the government has also set a target of improving healthy life expectancy in the poorest parts of England to at least 61 years from 50.5 years. If the plan is more than a rebrand, those figures will have to move alongside the length of waiting lists, referral times and the speed of diagnosis.

The new document builds on the original Women’s Health Strategy for England, published in August 2022 as a 10-year strategy. Ministers announced on 23 October 2025 that it would be renewed as part of the wider 10-Year Health Plan, alongside the addition of menopause questions to NHS Health Checks. The government said then that women’s views from the health plan consultation would shape the renewal and that the new version would identify barriers to care and spell out how to remove them.

The pressure for action has been building for years. In 2024, the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee concluded that women with painful reproductive conditions were often told to “suck it up” and endure pain for years because of “medical misogyny.” In March 2025, the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists said the UK had the largest gender health gap in the G20 and the 12th largest globally, warning that systemic, operational, structural and cultural problems were still blocking care.

Campaigners say the scale of the problem remains stark. Endometriosis UK and Cysters said in 2026 that the average time to diagnose endometriosis had reached 9 years and 4 months. The Office for National Statistics says the condition affects an estimated 1 in 10 women of reproductive age, underscoring how many patients can spend years waiting for answers while services remain uneven, slow and too often dismissive.