In February this year, Beth Harris sat in the day surgery waiting room of her local hospital and tried to steady her nerves.
She was there for a hysteroscopy, in this case to remove a fibroid. A thin surgical instrument with a lens, a light, a blade and an irrigation system for pumping saline solution would be inserted through her vagina and cervix, into her womb. The saline solution would widen the womb and the fibroid would be shaved away. Her hospital had advised taking paracetamol or ibuprofen an hour before the appointment, which Harris had done. However, the appointment was for 1pm, and by 4pm, she was still waiting in her hospital gown, surrounded by other patients.
Hysteroscopies are common procedures – classed by the NHS as “high volume low complexity”. In 2021, 71,000 took place in England alone. This was Harris’s third. “I’d been shocked by how painful the first two were,” she says. They had been “diagnostic” only – examinations of the inside of the womb – because years of breast cancer medication had led her womb lining to thicken. When she learned that she had a fibroid that needed removing, Harris’s first question was: “Will it be painful?” Her gynaecologist assured her that she would be given local anaesthetic and “wouldn’t feel anything”. He compared it to “going to the dentist”.
When Harris was finally called in, there were several people in the theatre. “There was the gynaecologist, nurses, an anaesthetist behind me, although he didn’t do anything. They were talking to each other throughout – no one was sitting with me. It was very casual.” The gynaecologist administered local anaesthetic – a small injection near the cervix – but there was no pause to see if it had worked. “There was no gap, no questions,” she says. “The injection itself was painful, but the procedure, with this spinning blade inside you, was unbelievable. The pressure, the pushing of the machine, the manipulation – it was barbaric. I’ve never experienced anything like it in my life. I felt as if I’d been assaulted. By the end, I was crying my eyes out.” A nurse led her, sobbing, to the recovery room. “There was no dignity, no privacy,” says Harris. “I said to her: ‘There must be a better way of doing this.’”
Katharine Tylko, a founder member of the campaign group Hysteroscopy Action (HA), has been saying the same thing for 16 years. HA was formed in 2010 to demand that all hysteroscopy patients are fully informed about the procedure, including the risk of severe pain, and given a full range of pain relief choices – local anaesthesia, gas and air, conscious sedation, epidural, and, for those who need it, general anaesthetic. “In short, we want parity with colonoscopy patients, half of whom are men,” says Tylko. In April, the renewed Women’s Health Strategy set out by the then health secretary Wes Streeting seemed a major breakthrough. Action 7 of the strategy called for informed consent and a choice of pain relief for hysteroscopies. “We were thrilled,” says Tylko, “but there’s been nothing since. Just silence.”
Source: The Guardian, 16 August 2026
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