Final Report on Women’s Health Plan published

This final report on the Women's Health Plan 2021 to 2024 provides a summary of progress made.

The Women’s Health Plan 2021 to 2024 was published with the aim to improve health outcomes and services for all women and girls in Scotland. The Plan focused on creating the conditions that can change culture, support women’s health and tackle the inequalities that have affected women’s health for generations. Now that this phase of the plan has come to its end, the Scottish Government have published a report summarising progress made towards delivering the actions contained within it.

The report highlights progress on the cross-cutting actions, on contraception, abortion, sexual health and pre-pregnancy actions and how improvement has been driven forward on menopause and menstrual health including endometriosis. Further sections highlight how actions on heart health and gender and health are moving forward, with the report concluding by looking forward to the Plan’s second phase.

The Plan’s actions are divided into short-term (one year), medium-term (one-to-three years) and long term (three years or more) timescales. Many of the long-term actions in the Plan address long standing, complex and often systemic issues and were designed to continue beyond this phase of the Plan.

The ALLIANCE has been delivering a women’s health programme since 2022 working with the Scottish Government in support of the Women’s Health Plan 2021-2024. We have also published our own report outlining the highlight of our work over the last 2 and a half yeas. Over this time, we have aimed to create opportunities for women to share their experiences to influence progress and innovation, whilst also ensuring that supportive and comprehensive information on women’s health is readily available and accessible.

As noted within the Scottish Government’s report, all of our work is not done. Despite progress, recent research has found that ‘women’s health across the UK is in decline’. Health inequalities also remain, and in some instances, have widened.

Developing the future phases of the Women’s Health Plan, the Scottish Government will be asking what they can do better or differently to support women and girls of all ages across all stages of their lives and considering the many factors that make up a healthy life. This will involve building on existing progress by working with women and girls, healthcare professionals, academics and the third sector across Scotland including the ALLIANCE to ask what they want to see in the next phase of the Women’s Health Plan and ground any actions in up to date research and evidence.

You can read the Scottish Government’s Women’s Health Plan final full report here.

A ‘Women’s Health Plan: Review of the Data Landscape’ has been published as an accompaniment to this Final Report. This document sets out a range of publicly available data on the health of women in Scotland and highlights where there appear to be gaps.

For more information about the Scottish Government’s work, or any other topic in the Women’s Health Plan report, please contact womenshealthplan@gov.scot.

For any queries on the ALLIANCE’s programme and our report please contact Jennifer Stewart, Senior Development Officer – Women’s Health, at Jennifer.stewart@alliance-scotland.org.uk.

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