The UK’s Renewed Women’s Health Strategy sets out an ambitious plan. But can the NHS deliver it?
In April 2026, the UK’s Department of Health and Social Care published a Renewed Women’s Health Strategy building on the initial 2022 Strategy. The Renewed Strategy aligns with the NHS 10 Year Health Plan and its three shifts (into the community, towards digital and towards prevention). The Strategy itself highlights the shortcomings of the current approach NHS approach to women’s health:
- As of January 2026, there were 565,000 women on gynaecology waiting lists, with average waits of 15 weeks , making it in the top 5 highest and fastest growing elective waiting lists
- The average time from first seeing a doctor with symptoms to an official endometriosis diagnosis is over 9 years
- Inequalities in care are rife; Black women are more than twice as likely to die in childbirth and women aged 65 to 69 from the most deprived 20% of the population are almost 4 times more likely to live with frailty than the least deprived 20% of the population.
The Renewed Strategy is explicit that health outcomes for women must improve. This ambition is clear, and reiterated by Baroness Merron, Minister for Women’s Health and Mental Health in her foreword:
There is so much at stake for women and girls right now. But our health matters to everyone. When women are healthier, their families are healthier. When we thrive, the economy thrives. When we are treated fairly, society is fairer. In short, when women’s 4 health improves, life improves by every measure – for everyone. That is the promise of this strategy and the prize when we make it a reality.
In order to achieve this ambition, the Renewed Strategy sets out four key priorities to facilitate faster and decisive progress:
- Making women’s voices and choices central in healthcare
- Transforming NHS performance in services that matter most to women
- Supporting all women to lead healthy, prosperous lives
- Creating an approach to research and development that works for and empowers women
Underlying these four priorities are 117 implementation actions, each of which will require additional or reallocated resources to deliver.
The ambition set out in the Renewed Strategy is much needed and genuinely welcome, with clear priorities. However, the obvious question is how will these changes be implemented in an NHS which continues to be under extraordinary pressure. In this insight, we explore five unanswered questions about how progress will be achieved, applying a health economics lens to help ensure its ambition translates into delivery.
Five unanswered questions from the Renewed Strategy
- Are we willing to trade-off health gains to reduce inequality?
The Strategy explicitly targets inequalities among and within groups of women; with one of the 3 overarching success measures being “reduce the time women spend in poor health, especially for women experiencing the greatest health inequalities”. Yet, not all interventions or initiatives will increase population health and increase health equality;,
Given that the reforms tabled in the strategy will be funded from the overall NHS budget, they will be competing against other existing initiatives and interventions. As such, distributional cost-effectiveness analysis (DCEAs) could be one mechanism to assess whether the new interventions are good value for money and the equity implications . DCEAs are accepted by NICE as part of supplementary evidence on health inequalities but could be used more widely. - Will broader value be recognised and accounted for within decision-making?
Many of the priority conditions within women’s health are high-morbidity and low-mortality, such as endometriosis, menopause and heavy menstrual bleeding. They primarily impact quality of life and other broader value elements such as productivity; standard HTA perspectives tend not adequately capture the full range of benefits from technologies that improve these conditions. OHE’s work on broader value frameworks sets out the case for a targeted and balanced approach to ensure that important spillovers effects of technologies are considered where appropriate.
The recent NICE adoption of the new EQ-5D-5L value set is likely to have implications for technologies being appraised for these conditions too. Initial research suggests that life-extending technologies are likely to fare better on average than those that improve quality of life compared to the EQ-5D-3L value set. Read more about the new value set’s implications here. - Does the NHS have the workforce and capacity to support the women’s health hubs based in neighbourhood services?
The Strategy’s community shift depends on neighbourhood women’s health hubs absorbing low-complexity gynaecology, contraception, menopause and heavy menstrual bleeding care, that currently sit on overstretched secondary care waiting lists. The Sunderland Women’s Health Hub case study demonstrates that there is the potential for returns on investments in women’s health hubs over the next 10 years. This success has been underpinned by professional training and cross-sector leadership. However, the workforce model to support additional women’s health hubs will be driven by the 10 Year Workforce Plan, which is not yet published. Therefore, it is currently unknown whether there will be the workforce to support the ambition to effectively support women’s health hubs in the community.
In addition, to ensure sustained workforce investment, the impact of the shift in women’s health hubs will need to look beyond activity-based metrics to account for improvements in the quality of care, such as improved patient experience, earlier diagnosis and fewer GP visits. These are more difficult to track and monitor than conventional productivity measures but relying on the latter will likely understate the value of hubs that provide care in ways that better suit the needs of the local population. - Do the funding commitments in the report support the shift to prevention?
Explicit funding commitments throughout The Strategy include £2.6 billion for 20 new DEXA scanners for the early detection of osteoporosis, £2.3 billion over 3 years for improvements in cancer diagnostics in the community and £7 million in financial year 2026/27 for Early Support Hubs for mental health. These ensure that funding is available to support these actions.
However, not all of the reforms in the strategy are accompanied by an explicit funding commitment. The commitments are presented as isolated, one-line commitments, and there is no single totalled budget for the prevention shift. In addition, where financial commitments are made these are for a single-year or on a short-term basis, with no plan for support for continued implementation of the activities throughout the duration of the 10 Year Plan. OHE research on funding for prevention highlighted that preventative activities often provide benefits in the longer term and so a lack of sustainable funding could make it more challenging to demonstrate the benefits of the investments and therefore, more difficult to secure a longer-term prioritisation of prevention. - Is the implementation of reimbursement based on women’s feedback feasible?
So-called ‘patient power payments’ are a proposed innovative approach to funding flows whereby patients are contacted after receiving care to give their say on whether the full payment for the costs of their care should be released to the provider. These payments are currently being trialled and further recommendations will be made in the 2028 to 2029 NHS payment scheme; any funding withheld due to poor experiences would be used for targeted improvements to the same services.
This is effectively a variation of outcomes-based payment schemes, based on patient experience. Previous OHE research has found can promote value for money in NHS spending but are also difficult to implement in practice, tend to have high administrative costs due to data collection requirements and can lead to unintended consequences if not designed carefully. There are further considerations needed when using patient’s perspectives on care rather than clinical outcomes, such as how to ensure that patients engage in the providing feedback and how to ensure that gaming and bias do not play a role in the payments released to providers. Perhaps the biggest risk with this approach is that poor providers are penalised financially and may have less ability to change, depending on the allocation of the withheld funding. As such, there needs to be clear ringfencing of improvement funds with guidance on how these should be used, whilst allowing flexibility for targeted improvements that reflect the feedback received.
Conclusions
In the foreword to the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy, former Health Secretary Wes Streeting promises a much-needed move towards ‘an NHS that finally listens with respect, dignity and compassion to the voices and the choices of every woman and every girl, every time.’
This is a mandate passed on to a new government, now led by Prime Minister Andy Burnham, which inherits both the commitments of the 10 Year Health Plan for England and the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy. Despite wider ministerial changes at the Department of Health and Social Care, Baroness Merron has remained in post as Minister for Women’s Health and Mental Health, offering a reassuring degree of continuity for the Strategy’s implementation.
How they will deliver on these commitments – and in particular, how they will be funded long term – is yet to be seen, as we look ahead to the Autumn Budget announcement. Without clear answers to these questions, the Strategy’s ambition and the NHS’ capacity to deliver on it remain separate. The Amos and Ockenden Reviews, both published within months of the Strategy, are a stark reminder of what’s at stake. Both Reviews found systemic failures in neonatal and maternity services going back decades. They are the latest evidence that women’s health strategies do not fail for lack of diagnosis; they fail for lack of implementation, which is precisely why the five questions above should be proactively considered.
