Endometriosis: lived experience insight report 2023

Background

Scottish Government policy background

In 2021 the Scottish Government published the Women's Health Plan to improve women's health inequalities by raising awareness around women's health and improving access to health care for women across their life course.

Enhancing care and support for people with endometriosis is one of the early priorities set out in the plan. It includes actions to improve access to appropriate support, speedy diagnosis and best treatment for endometriosis.

Lived experience has long been incorporated into the design of health initiatives in Scotland. In 2020, Healthcare Improvement Scotland published findings about the use of Experience-Based Co-Design in health services across Scotland.^[4] This approach had led to improvements in the experience of care across different service areas across Scotland.

Lived experience

A term that refers to the things that someone has experienced first-hand rather than through representations from others. This can be helpful in research to gain insights into how services work for people and the impact they have on them.

To deliver on the actions in the Women's Health Plan a quality improvement approach is being applied. In order to identify the systems currently in place and understand how the healthcare pathways work for people with endometriosis, a number of lived experience interviews were held to develop this knowledge.