The first national plan for women's health, published in 2022, sets out a 10-year ambition to boost the health and wellbeing of all women and girls.
Here in the North East and North Cumbria we are turning our ambition for women's health into action – using the strength, collaboration, and energy we have, to create our own implementation plan and make the changes we want to see now and for future generations.
Our Women's Health Programme is an ambitious transformational programme of work to impact on health, access and outcomes for the 51% of our population – women and girls.
Our programme underpinned by robust data profiling, needs assessment, and mapping – alongside listening to the voices of women and girls in the North East and North Cumbria.
Our women’s health ambition and programme was born to
- Make sure women’s voices are heard – tackling taboos and stigmas and increasing representation of women at all levels of the health and care system.
- Improve access to even more services for women – making sure they meet their reproductive health needs across their lives and prioritising services for conditions such as endometriosis.
- Support women – making sure a woman’s age, ethnicity, sexuality, disability, or where she is from does not impact upon her ability to access services, or the treatment she receives.
- Share a regional approach to safeguard women and girls against violence and tackle sexual safety.
- Ensure better information and education – helping women and wider society equip themselves with accurate information about women’s health.
- Have a greater understanding of how women’s health affects their experience in the workplace –normalising taboo conversations such as periods and menopause - helping women to feel supported in the workplace.
- Ensure better research – addressing the lack of research into women’s health conditions and improving representation of women from all demographics in research.
Our priorities
Menstrual health and gynaecological conditions
Fertility, pregnancy, pregnancy loss and post-natal support
Menopause
Mental health and wellbeing
Cancers
The health impacts of violence against women and girls
Healthy ageing and long-term conditions
In our first year we...
- Held our first ever Women's Health conference in October 2023 in partnership with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID).
- Launched a health profile and developed a needs assessment which provides an overview of inequalities in health outcomes and risk factors for women.
- Invested £600,000 in 'one stop shop' women's health hubs in Sunderland, Gateshead and North Cumbria
- Launched new initiatives to provide better menopause support
- Improved care for breast pain, fertility, and maternal health
- Supported community pharmacies to provide UTI treatments and contraceptives providing easier access to treatment for women
- Investing in specialist and general training – menopause and LARC coil and implant fitting.
Our needs assessment
In partnership with the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) we have published our needs assessment.
It summarises the data and intelligence around women’s health in the region according to the strategic priorities. It identifies gaps in data and makes recommendations for system level improvements that can be made to improve health outcomes for women. The needs assessment is not a fully comprehensive report of everything we know about women’s health in the North East and North Cumbria but serves to paint a picture of women’s current health status in the region, setting out a rationale for change. This will form part of our implementation plans going forward and builds on our health profile launched at our first conference in 2023.
You can read it here.
As part of our learning and improvement community for the North East and North Cumbria, women's health resources are being developed so we can share and learn from each other to improve health for women and girls. You can find out more here.
