Women's health plan 2021 to 2024: data landscape review

Executive summary

Please find the link to the Women’s Health Plan Final Report.

Background

This document is an accompaniment to the Women’s Health Plan (WHP) 2021-24 final report. It sets out a range of publicly available data on the health of women in Scotland and highlights where there appear to be gaps. This report will be used to inform the development of the next phase of the WHP. Going forward, further work will be undertaken to explore the sources and their implications in more detail.

Approach

To identify relevant sources, searches were carried out for data relating to the priority areas of the WHP (menopause, menstrual health, endometriosis, abortion and contraception, post-natal contraception and heart health) as well as broader topics such as women’s general health and health-related behaviours.

The searches were conducted using the Public Health Scotland (PHS) website, the Scottish Government website and Google. Stakeholders such as PHS also helped with identifying relevant sources.

Summary

There is a great deal of published data on health conditions, health behaviours and healthcare experiences which are broken down by gender. Key sources include the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS), data published by PHS and data published by National Records of Scotland (NRS).

The most recent findings from the sources identified highlight that:

• Women have a higher healthy life expectancy than men but because they live longer, they spend more time in poor health compared with their male counterparts.
• Women are consistently experiencing a greater burden of mental health issues than men. Anxiety amongst young women is more than double that of their male counterparts.
• Teenage pregnancy rates increased in 2022 for the first time in over a decade.
• Termination of pregnancy rates increased substantially in 2023.
• Women are having children later in life and rates of maternal obesity, diabetes and preterm birth rates have been increasing since 2010/11.
• Deprivation is a key mediating factor across several aspects of women’s health.
• Alzheimer’s disease and dementia are the leading causes of death in women and breast cancer is the most common cancer for women.
• Women are more likely to be living with chronic pain compared with men.
• Women are less likely to be physically active than men and almost two thirds of adult women are overweight or obese.
• Almost two thirds of GPs are women and a higher percentage of women are unpaid carers than men.

However, this report also identified gaps in the publicly available data on the health of women in Scotland. In particular, there is a lack of published data around:

• Menarche, specifically the age of onset in Scotland and menstrual health conditions such as painful and heavy periods, premenstrual syndrome (PMS), period poverty, and menstrual migraines.
• Gynaecological conditions such as polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) and endometriosis.
• Menopause and perimenopause, for example the age of onset, prevalence and experiences of symptoms and the prescription rate of HRT for the treatment of menopause symptoms.
• Contraception other than LARC methods, for example the contraceptive pill and barrier methods such as condoms.
• Infertility and miscarriages, for example rates of infertility and miscarriages across different groups of women in Scotland.