Women’s healthcare stuck in the Nineties, says health tsar

Women’s healthcare in the UK is stuck in the Nineties and red tape is blocking treatments on the NHS, the government’s women’s health ambassador has warned.

Dame Lesley Regan said women and girls had been “let down” by successive governments’ failure to take their health seriously. She announced plans for an “open door” policy to make it easier for treatments, tests and technology to become available on the NHS.

Speaking at the Women’s Health Week Europe conference in London this week, she said she was frequently asked if statistics about women’s health and access to care in the UK were from “1995 not 2025”.

“This is a really sad state of affairs,” said Regan, who is a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Imperial College London. “We’ve got so complacent about the importance of women’s health that we’ve really let girls and women down.”

She cited figures showing women suffered disproportionately from conditions such as osteoporosis, frailty and dementia in old age. More than 600,000 women are on the NHS waiting list for hospital gynaecology treatment and the gender health gap costs the UK economy £36 billion a year, mainly in lost productivity from women who are unable to work.

Regan said she was “really frustrated” that developers of treatments, tests and technology aimed at improving women’s healthcare often experienced pushback when they approached the government or were blocked by complex bureaucracy from making their products available via the NHS.

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Source: The Times, 20 October 2025

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