Meeting of the Parliament 12 November 2024
I am extremely passionate about women’s health, so I warmly welcome this debate and the opportunity to bring this important topic back to the chamber.
We know that women’s health is not just a women’s issue. When women are supported to lead healthy lives and fulfil their potential, everyone benefits. Women make up 79 per cent of our national health service workforce, 89 per cent of our teachers, 80 per cent of our social care workers, 59 per cent of our unpaid carers and 92 per cent of single parents. To prioritise women’s health is to prioritise the health of Scotland.
However, we know that women and girls face inequality and disadvantage because they are women. That has to change, and we are determined to create the conditions that we need to improve health outcomes for women and girls.
In August 2021, Scotland became the first nation in the United Kingdom to publish a plan for women’s health. The plan’s ambition—and, I hope, the ambition of us all here today—is for all women and girls to enjoy the best possible health throughout their lives.
The first phase of the plan focused on a set of priorities to address particular inequalities for women, such as heart health, and on areas in which women told us that improvements were needed, such as action on menopause and menstrual health. Healthcare professionals, academics, third sector colleagues, researchers and, most important, women came together to inform the plan, and I am pleased that we have been able to make progress in implementing the actions in it during what has been and continues to be a challenging time for NHS Scotland and for all our public services.
Three years on from the plan’s publication, it is right that we take stock and reflect. In doing so, I will highlight just a few of the achievements of the past three years. In January 2023, we appointed our women’s health champion, Professor Anna Glasier OBE, which was an important milestone in the progress of the women’s health plan. I am very pleased that Professor Glasier joins us in the chamber today. Professor Glasier has had a long and distinguished career in women’s reproductive health and, as the women’s health champion, she plays a pivotal role in raising the profile of women’s health, sharing her unparalleled expertise and challenging the status quo. I thank Professor Glasier for being our women’s health champion and for her leadership and her passion for driving change and innovation. I am delighted that she has agreed to remain our women’s health champion to ensure continuity into the next phase of the women’s health plan.
In addition to our women’s health champion, we now have a women’s health lead in every NHS board. The leads are able to highlight issues that impact women across Scotland, which enables national responses to be taken. Most recently, they have focused on improving access to longer-acting reversible methods of contraception.
During the plan’s development, we heard consistently from women that they wanted a reliable source of information on women’s health. In response, in May 2022, we launched the women’s health platform on NHS Inform, which provides new resources on menopause and menstrual health. The platform offers women and girls access to comprehensive and reliable information, including myth-busting videos, information on symptoms and options for care. As of last month, there had been more than 2.95 million views on the menopause pages alone.
The importance of information on menopause was particularly illustrated to me in April this year when I visited the Maggie’s centre in Edinburgh. I met a group of women experiencing treatment-induced menopause, and they described their personal experiences of menopause during their cancer journey and the importance of good-quality information on treatment-induced menopause. It was a privilege to spend time with those women, and I am very grateful that they felt able to share their experiences. As we move to the next phase of the women’s health plan, I hope that we can continue to learn from women’s experiences and the work that organisations such as Maggie’s do to go even further in our support for women and girls.
We know that endometriosis affects one in 10 women, which is why tackling it featured as a key priority in the women’s health plan. Last year, the national centre for sustainable delivery published the endometriosis pathway for Scotland to improve women’s access to diagnosis and care, and I was delighted to visit the endometriosis specialist centre in Aberdeen a couple of months ago to learn more about how the pathway works in practice.