While women may have a greater life expectancy than men on average, they typically spend a greater proportion of their lives living with illness.
This is due to disparities both within the diagnosis and treatment of illnesses that can affect everyone, such as heart attacks, and of women-specific illnesses such as endometriosis, which can often face significant delays to diagnosis.
Analysis by NHS Confederation last year found that around 60,000 women in the UK are unable to work because of the impact of menopause symptoms on their overall physical and mental health.
It also suggested that additional funding for women’s health services could provide a direct return on investment of £319m for the economy if there was £1 invested in obstetrics and gynaecology services per woman.
The importance of addressing this disparity has been recognised by the government.
Earlier this month, in a response to a report by the House of Commons Women and Equalities Committee (WEC) which found medical misogyny in the healthcare system, the government said training for primary care practitioners on women’s health was ‘crucial’.
In a parliamentary debate on women’s health last month, health minister Ashley Dalton responded to rumours that they would scrap the women’s health strategy and ‘abandon women’s health hubs’, saying this was ‘misinformation’.
She said: ‘We have not scrapped the women’s health strategy, nor have we abandoned women’s health hubs—far from it. We are using women’s health hubs to beat the backlog. The future funding decisions around those health hubs will be taken in due course.’
ICBs were commissioned with setting up at least one women’s health hub by December 2024 to provide core services to women, however there were rumours that this commitment had been scrapped after it was not mentioned in the recent planning guidance. In October, Healthcare Leader looked at the progress of these hubs across the country.
However, innovative technology is also being used to try and tackle this disparity and to improve women’s health.
SBRI Healthcare, a national programme providing development funding to entrepreneurs, has now granted £1.3m for the development of 14 innovations that support women’s health.
The prize, launched in partnership with the Health Innovation Network and funded by the Accelerated Access Collaborative, provided ‘phase one’ development funding for projects running for up to six months to demonstrate whether they are commercially and technically feasible.
These innovations include Lighthearted AI Health Limited, which received £99,125 for its tool to better detect heart valve disease in women.
The tool, called LightScope, uses a laser to capture bio-vitals in the neck, which can detect heart valve disease, which is typically harder to diagnose in women.
The early diagnosis of heart valve disease can then lead to a minimally invasive elective surgery which can prevent heart failure from happening, prevent more expensive emergency surgery and enable patients without any other comorbidities to live another 15-20 years, according to chief executive of Lighthearted Ai, Lucrezia Cester.
‘If you pick it up early, you could have a one-day minimum invasive in and out procedure,’ says Ms Cester. ‘But if you let it go too long, you cannot do anything, and this is a huge cost to the NHS because it needs to be treated in an emergency unit.’
She added that women are ‘disproportionately affected’ by this disease compared with men.
‘Part of the problem is that currently diagnostic methods are based on data largely based on clinical trials for men, but women have different anatomies and present the disease differently, therefore we don’t pick it up in women which then presents later when there is much less that can be done,’ she says.
Ms Cester says this was due to two reasons – breast tissue being present and because women have smaller hearts with a typically higher frequency, meaning that they cannot always be accurately recorded on a stethoscope.
‘Thus, women live much less than men which is one of the key areas of showing there is a deprivation in the community,’ she adds. ‘There is a lot of health inequalities that arise from this condition.’
However, by using a laser to measure the heart data in the neck, this negates these challenges with diagnosis, says Ms Cester. The tool is currently in the process of getting regulatory approvals. It has done a scientific study at Queen Elizabeth Hospital in Glasgow, and they are in the process of finding a setting to do an analytical trial before its final clinical validation trial which will also happen in Glasgow. Ms Cester added they were currently ‘open to collaboration for the validation trial’.
For now, the SBRI funding will be used to explore which pathway the tool could be most effectively used in within the NHS.
‘We have identified some patient pathways, for example when women go for a breast screening examination we could also do this,’ says Ms Cester. ‘Another patient pathway is a flu jab, because that’s typically a place where we can pick up even more women.’
However, Ms Cester believes that not everybody needs to be screened using the tool. She suggests there are some regions in the UK where the disease is more prevalent than others, and these ICBs are the ones that should consider looking at this intervention.
Another tool that has received SBRI funding for their women’s health intervention is Holly Health, a digital health and wellbeing coaching tool which already has been used across primary care to help remind patients of specific health habits.
The new tool that Holly Health is developing using the £79,247 of SBRI funding is a coaching service to target binge eating in women.
Chief science officer at Holly Health, Daniela Mercado Beivide, said: ‘We know through research that 30% of people seeking to lose weight have binge eating symptoms, but that usually goes completely unnoticed because no one really digs into that.
‘They get told to go on a diet, do exercise, but they don’t get psychological support and then left unmanaged that can lead to a diagnosis of binge eating disorder.’
Taking these statistics, she estimates there could be as many as 3 million women in the UK struggling with these symptoms.
The funding was granted to address this problem by developing a pathway within the Holly Health coaching service which can log people who have eating behaviour challenges, provide them with psychological support and behaviour change support to try and prevent binge eating disorder from occurring.
‘Prevention should be the goal,’ adds Ms Beivide. ‘That’s how we can save a lot of problems down the line. Preventing a diagnosis of an eating disorder could save £3.5bn a year. That’s what it costs the NHS currently.’
As part of the development process, Holly Health is running three focus groups in the women’s health hub in Birmingham and Solihull ICB, alongside interviews with clinicians and surveys of existing users of Holly Health and the general population.
If they got funding for phase two of the programme, this would be to develop the service within the Holly Health app and to test it in a clinical trial.
‘There’s nowhere people can be flagged for these challenges and get support, so we’re thinking people could get referred to us the way they do now through primary care, where we get deployed through SMS messages to whole populations in GP practices and PCNs.’
‘The goal would be to roll it out at an ICS level as either a standalone service or as a service people get while waiting for other support,’ she added. But for now, the funding will help to solidify where in the care pathway the tool would fit.
Other tools supported by the SBRI funding include Spryt Ltd, which was awarded £100,000 for increasing cervical screening rates to the national average in North Central London. This is through an AI receptionist to enable patients to book, cancel or reschedule medical appoints via WhatsApp without requiring a website or app.
DDM Health Limited also received £78,063 for a digital health tool to help women manage chronic conditions like obesity and type 2 diabetes through data insights, behaviour change tools and AI-driven engagement.
On the news of the funding for the 14 innovations, Dr Sue Mann, national clinical director for women’s health at NHS England, said it was ‘fantastic’ to see new technologies evolving.
‘Innovations such as these can play more and more of a part in improving care for women,’ she added.
Verena Stocker, chief executive of the Accelerated Access Collaborative, added: ‘We have selected these innovations because they have the potential to make a big difference to women’s health.
‘By supporting the most promising innovations, the NHS will continue to evolve, helping to meet more patients’ needs and encouraging more innovators to come forward with innovative ideas that benefit all.’
Other tools have already been introduced to help improve women’s health, such as the AI tool helping to detect breast cancer in 30 sites across the country, and a cancer screening service for women called ‘ping and book’ which will be rolled out through the NHS App over the next two years.
However, with women from ethnic minority groups in particular facing obstacles to accessing healthcare due to the way services are structured, there is still some way to go and many will be hoping for robust commitments in the government’s 10-year health plan, due this Spring.
Health minister Ms Dalton added in the parliamentary debate last month that the government was ‘still nowhere near satisfied with the state of women’s healthcare’.
‘For too long, women have been let down by their healthcare. The system is broken—it does not work for them,’ she added. ‘This Government are committed to fixing women’s health as a key part of building an NHS fit for the future.’
