Rewriting Women’s Health: From Gaps to Real Options

There’s something that has never quite sat right with me about how we discuss women’s health. We often state that the healthcare system is failing women. But when we look more closely, we can start to question whether it was ever actually designed with women in mind. 

Before anything else, I was a cancer clinician. I’ve sat with women at some of the hardest points in their lives, going through treatment and trying to process diagnoses that often came too late. In this role, you quickly see what late diagnosis really means. Not just clinically, but emotionally. What it takes out of someone, and what it takes out of the people around them.

Over time, it became clear to me that this wasn’t just about individual cases. It reflected a broader gap in access to preventative healthcare for women.

And for me, that wasn’t just something I saw at work.

I lost my mum to cancer. It wasn’t sudden or unpredictable. It was something that had been building quietly for years. She had gynaecological symptoms that were never properly investigated or joined up. Multiple appointments, fragmented conversations, but no clear answers and no one taking ownership of the whole picture. By the time everything came together, it was too late.

That experience fundamentally changed how I understood the system I was working in - and reinforced what I had already begun to see clinically: a systemic gap in prevention and early intervention.

Now, working in women’s health innovation, as Head of Health System Partnerships at Daye, I’m seeing the same gap from a different side - particularly in HPV (Human Papilloma Virus - a common virus that can lead to cancers over time) screening, where access and uptake remain critical challenges.

What we’re missing is a system that connects solutions in a way that actually works for women’s lives. You can see it most clearly in gynaecological service delays.

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NHS England published their December 2025 elective recovery data that showed over 570,000 women are waiting for gynaecology care in England, with just over half seen within 18 weeks, according to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists and these numbers are growing.

This means women are living with unmanaged pain, worsening conditions, delayed diagnoses, and in some cases, more complex treatment later on.

So, women wait; to be referred, to be seen, and for answers.

And over time, that waiting becomes normalised.

The Roots of the Problem

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Women’s health has long been under-researched and underfunded, leading to critical gaps in the evidence base and the persistent underrepresentation of diverse female populations in clinical research. As a result, healthcare systems are not fully equipped to meet women’s needs across the life course. These limitations are not confined to the data—they are embedded in how care is structured and delivered, creating real-world barriers to access and sustained engagement.

Recent findings from the Gender Equality Index 2025 highlight that while women are more likely to interact with healthcare services, this is often driven by reproductive health needs and caregiving roles rather than equitable access. At the same time, poverty, social exclusion, and structural inequality continue to limit access to care, meaning need does not translate into access.

Furthermore, in Europe, one in four women report that men are treated better by healthcare professionals, reinforcing how trust, perception, and experience shape engagement with care.

For many women, it’s not one barrier, it’s everything at once - time, responsibility, past experience - and over time, prevention just stops being a priority.

Where Prevention Starts to Slip

One area of preventative care where this is rife, is in cervical cancer screening.

Persistent high-risk HPV infection causes almost all cervical cancer cases globally, as outlined by the World Health Organisation. Screening programmes, which detect high-risk strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) in cervical cells to identify those at risk of developing cancer, reduce mortality significantly. Yet, uptake is falling, particularly among younger women and those in more deprived communities. This gap matters because it’s not about women not caring about their health, it’s about their lives not aligning with how the system is designed. It’s not apathy, it’s friction.

But, the answer isn’t to replace the system we have, it’s to build around it.

Providing Women with Options

At Daye, we are a women’s health company focused on bridging the gender gap in healthcare by developing clinically validated, at-home diagnostics for gynaecological health. Our goal is to provide alternative diagnostic options for women that subvert the barriers they face to traditional healthcare pathways, so that more women can access effective preventative healthcare.

This includes a tampon-based HPV test designed to expand access to preventative screening for those underserved by traditional pathways.

Self-collection studies across diverse populations show high acceptability and engagement of HPV self-sampling kits, particularly among women who would otherwise avoid screening. This is also reflected in emerging real-world evidence, including clinical studies on complementary access products such as the Diagnostic Tampon, which demonstrates comparable accuracy to clinician-collected samples, high valid result rates, and strong user preference for tampon-based self-sampling. Ongoing research in global settings such as Tanzania with Muslim patients is further exploring how these approaches can improve access and engagement among underserved populations.

This matters for women who are currently underserved; Trans men who find traditional screening dysphoric, women from Black communities where trust has been eroded, traveller communities with inconsistent access, and women who have experienced sexual violence who may find traditional exams retraumatising.

For many of these groups, the issue isn’t awareness, it’s whether the system feels safe enough, accessible enough, and designed for them. This is where innovation in women’s health can make a real difference, meeting women where they are and giving them real choice, because choice isn’t a luxury, it’s how access becomes real.

Building Something Better Together

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We don’t need to reinvent the system, but we do need to rethink how it shows up. In HPV screening, for example, innovations like the diagnostic tampon show how we can expand access through familiar, at-home formats, but this isn’t unique to cervical screening. Across women’s health, from hormone testing to STI and microbiome diagnostics, we’re seeing a shift towards more accessible, preventative models of care. The research is there, the tools are emerging, and the need is clear. What’s missing is how we bring these together within the system in a way that actually works. This isn’t about replacing what exists, but about expanding and connecting it. We need to integrate new approaches into existing pathways so they reach more women.

This isn’t something one organisation fixes on its own. It takes all of us. As a community, as a collective voice, and as people who genuinely want change in women’s health — working differently and working together. As we build new services and pathways, we have to make sure we’re not leaving anyone behind. Because I strongly feel the time is now.

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Let’s do this for our mums, our grandmothers, our daughters, our sisters, and every woman around us — they all deserve better.