Women’s Health Programme roundup 2025

The Women’s Health Plan Programme continues to represent lived experience priorities in policy development on women’s health.

In 2025 we continued to raise awareness and promote a broader conversation on women’s health experiences through our Women’s Health programme, delivered in support of the Scottish Government’s Women’s Health Plan (WHP).

This year we played a key role in contributing to developments of Phase 2 of the Women’s Health Plan (2026). This involved representing the views of our members, our lived experience stakeholders and other third sector partners within Scottish Government working groups, and facilitating lived experience input via our Women’s Health Lived Experience Stakeholder Group. This year we hosted two in-person workshops with the Stakeholder Group and Scottish Government which were impactful milestones in Phase 2’s development process. We were joined at one session by the Minister for Public Health and Women’s Health, Jenni Minto MSP, who expressed her gratitude for the Group’s valuable contribution to future policy and service design.

To ensure that women’s real experiences of accessing health services are better understood, we worked with several organisations in 2025 to highlight key aspects of women’s health journeys that have often been overlooked or are in need of investment. At the ALLIANCE annual conference we hosted a session alongside the ALLIANCE Scotland Reducing Gambling Harm programme, Aberlour Mother and Baby House and Simon Community, to discuss the importance of creating services that are trauma informed and gender-sensitive, particularly around addiction and recovery. We also worked with Health Improvement Scotland to support our lived experience network members to input into the consultation on new standards for maternity care, to ensure that these are representative of the real challenges or good practice examples that women had experienced during pregnancy and/or birth.

We continued our successful women’s health webinar series in 2025, where we aimed to provide clarity around common areas of women’s health, provide a framework for women to understand their own experiences and dispel prevailing myths and misinformation. In 2025 we reached over 400 online attendees, with webinars on women’s bowel health, women’s long-term health and healthy aging, and menopause and mental wellbeing. Our webinars were delivered with expert clinicians to ensure that information is trusted and reliable. We also continued to partner with the Young Women’s Movement to better reach young women and girls, hosting a joint webinar that explained menstruation and ‘what is normal’. Our events and complementing resources, such as this year’s Optimising Future Health Visual Resource, continue to raise awareness about women’s health and provide women with the information and confidence to advocate for themselves and seek support.

Across 2025 we have continued to work with groups across Scotland to promote uptake of our Conversation Café toolkit on women’s health. We were pleased to hear from various partners about the usefulness of the toolkit as a peer support model, and have supported independent use of the toolkit within communities through our quarterly facilitator support sessions. To further explore the role that peer support plays in supporting women’s health, we hosted a research placement student from Strathclyde University who conducted mapping and analysis of peer support services for women in Scotland. The report evidences the range of support across the country and the values that drive it, whilst also providing recommendations for better investment in and acknowledgement of the third sector’s role in this.

End of page.