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

1. Introduction

Background

This document is an accompaniment to the Women’s Health Plan (WHP) 2021-24 final report. Published in 2021, the WHP^[1] aimed to improve health outcomes and health services for all women and girls in Scotland. It included 66 actions over six priority areas, including menopause, menstrual health, endometriosis, abortion and contraception, post-natal contraception and heart health.

As well as actions to, for example, address gaps in service provision and raise awareness of health issues in women, the Plan included actions focused on improving data collection and building evidence around women’s health.

This document was developed to support these actions by setting out a range of publicly available data on the heath of women in Scotland and highlighting where there appear to be gaps. It covers a range of topics including general health, reproductive health, health conditions, health behaviours, healthcare experiences and unpaid care and the health and social care workforce (specifically GPs).

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

The priority areas of the WHP (menopause, menstrual health, endometriosis, abortion and contraception, post-natal contraception and heart health) were taken as the starting point for the development of this document. Searches were carried out for data sources relating to these areas, 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.

The sources covered in this report either are currently or were previously published on a regular basis, meaning that standalone or one-off research reports have not been included in most cases.

For each source, methodological information and the frequency of publication are provided, as well as a brief description of some of the most recent findings, to give an indication of types of information that the source can provide.

Key definitions

Menarche is the first occurrence of menstruation.

Menopause marks the ceasing of menstruation and usually happens for women between the ages of 45 and 55.

Perimenopause happens before menopause when women have symptoms of menopause but menstruation has not completely stopped.

Endometriosis is a disease in which tissue similar to the lining of the uterus grows outside the uterus. It can cause severe pain in the pelvis and can make it harder to get pregnant.

Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is a common condition that affects how a woman’s ovaries work. Main features include irregular periods, excess androgen (high levels of “male” hormones in the body) and polycystic ovaries (enlarged ovaries and contain fluid-filled sacs called follicles).

Woman and female – the terms “woman” and “female” are used interchangeably throughout this report, reflecting the different terminology used by the sources.

Scope

This document was produced by Scottish Government analysts but is not intended to provide a methods-based comprehensive or systematic review of all relevant available data or literature. Rather, it covers a selection of sources that were identified through the search process described above. This means that while it covers a range of information relevant to the WHP, it does not cover all publicly available data on the health of women in Scotland. For example, some surveys discussed, such as the Scottish Health Survey (SHeS), disaggregate all data by sex but not all of these data have been detailed.

Further, while an overview of the most recent findings is provided for each source, the aim was not to synthesise or draw conclusions from these findings or identify caveats associated with them.