FTI Consulting UK Public Affairs Snapshot: Progress on Paper? The Renewed Women’s Health Strategy in Focus

Published on 15 April 2026, the renewed Women’s Health Strategy arrives four years after its predecessor and against a backdrop of perceived lack of progress. Gynaecology waiting lists have barely moved. Diagnostic delays for conditions like endometriosis remain measured in years, sometimes decades. And women across England continue to report being dismissed, disbelieved, or misdiagnosed.

The renewed strategy is, in many respects, a significant step forward. The language is sharper. The commitments are broader. And some of the mechanisms, particularly on accountability, break new ground. But strip away the policy language and the real question is simple: will this strategy meaningfully change what women experience when they walk into the NHS?

There are reasons to think it might. The standout innovation is the proposed feedback pilot linking women’s experiences directly to provider funding. This reframes patient experience from a ‘nice to have’ into a real financial lever. That shift alone signals intent, but it is still a pilot with no clear timeline for national rollout and the impact remains hypothetical for now.

At present, women are bounced between services, waiting months between appointments, and falling through gaps is routine. Streamlining pathways might not be glamorous or headline grabbing, but it’s essential for improving care. The strategy promises to introduce single referral pathways and redesigned clinical routes for heavy menstrual bleeding and urogynaecology to tackle the system’s endemic fragmentation.

The integration of menopause questions into NHS Health Checks for women aged 40–74 is another example of quiet but meaningful progress. It normalises a life stage that has too often been sidelined and uses existing infrastructure to do it.

The strategy takes aim at the chronic underfunding and lack of robust data on women’s health. For context, women’s health receives only around five per cent of global R&D funding, despite representing half the population and a disproportionate share of disease burden. In the UK, a mere 2% of UK public research funding is spent on female reproductive health. Embedding sex-specific requirements through the National Institute for Health and Care Research aims to address a structural bias that has shaped clinical evidence for generations. If the strategy can ensure research starts to account for how diseases and treatments affect men and women differently, everything from diagnosis to treatment and outcomes has a better chance of improving too.

All of this fits neatly within the NHS’s broader reform agenda: moving care out of hospitals, into communities, and upstream into prevention. The strategy commits to cutting gynaecology waiting lists currently affecting more than 565,000 women and moving back towards the NHS 18-week treatment standard. Women’s health hubs, expanded community diagnostics, and digital access via NHS Online for menstrual and menopausal support are part of that same ‘left shift’.

On paper, it is a coherent model, and the strategy does deserve credit. But strategies do not fail on vision. They fail on delivery.

Start with funding. The strategy sits inside a wider £26 billion NHS settlement, but Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) are already under pressure and likely to remain so as mergers bed in and required cost cutting continues. The strategy allocates a modest £5 million of new investment but this falls flat in comparison to the £8 million allocated in the Men’s Health Strategy published last year. Without sufficient, ring-fenced funding, there is danger this becomes another set of lofty national priorities that disappear locally, absorbed into wider deficits and competing demands.

The strategy is rich in structural commitments, including 40 women’s health hubs, integrated diagnostic pathways and new digital tools, but it is markedly thinner on outcomes. This begs the question: what does success actually look like? Shorter diagnostic times? Reduced emergency presentations? Improved patient experience? If those metrics are not clearly defined, there is a risk progress is judged by what is built, not what changes for patients.

Autoimmune diseases are notably absent from the strategy, despite 13% of women in the UK living with one. 75% of autoimmune disease sufferers are female. Lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, Sjögren’s syndrome, and Hashimoto’s disease all disproportionately affect women. One study even found that women with multiple sclerosis experienced 30% longer diagnostic delays than men presenting with identical symptoms.

So where does that leave the Strategy?

It is stronger than its predecessors. It is more focused, more structural, and more aligned with wider NHS reform. It introduces ideas that could genuinely shift incentives and improve women’s experiences of health care.

But it is not yet decisive. The ambition is there, and much of the architecture is in place. However, there is significant scrutiny over whether it is adequately funded. The real test will be whether the strategy can secure both the public funding needed to embed these changes in the NHS and the private capital to scale innovation beyond it – and crucially, whether it can meaningfully confront the “appalling culture of medical misogyny” it identifies.