The Health of Women and Girls: Health and Social Care Policy - Beyond the Women's Health Plan

Health and Social Care Reform

The development of the Scottish Government’s health reform policies are taking this whole government approach.

The Service Renewal Framework (SRF) is a long-term plan to make care more local, personal, and effective. It is designed to complement the Operational Improvement Plan, which focuses on reducing long waits for planned care and improving access across the system – central to tackling long gynaecology waits.

It sits alongside the Population Health Framework (PHF), which prioritises primary prevention. While the PHF aims to prevent illness before it starts, the Service Renewal Framework focuses on secondary and tertiary prevention – ensuring timely diagnosis, treatment and ongoing care.

By addressing the wider determinants of health, promoting prevention, and supporting early intervention, the Women’s Health Plan seeks to ensure that the health system and beyond is responsive to the unique needs of women and girls throughout their lives.

With the ambitions of the Women’s Health Plan, these reform policies will work toward a Scotland where women and girls live longer, healthier, and more fulfilling lives.

Socioeconomic inequalities remain a critical driver of health disparities, disproportionately affecting women from disadvantaged backgrounds….Women in low-income households often struggle to afford medical treatments and encounter workplace inflexibility, limiting their ability to take time off for healthcare needs^[3].

While women may have a longer life expectancy than men, the proportion of their life that is spent in good health is notably and consistently lower than men’s. Women face a higher burden of morbidity^[4], which is why a focus on prevention and work to optimise future health is so important.

The Population Health Framework includes action to progress essential upstream interventions including Income Maximisation, Community Wealth Building and addressing the important contribution of better housing to health.

This work is fundamental to tackling the health inequalities women and girls face, further building on the ambitions of the Women’s Health Plan. It will be of particular importance for women and girls who are living in Scotland’s deprived communicates who are more likely to experience poor physical and mental health^[5].

The PHF sets out plans to tackle the root causes of poor health and reduce the life expectancy gap between the poorest and most affluent areas across Scotland, including initial action to reduce health harming risks during preconception and in pregnancy.

Vitally, the Framework is focussed on Primary Prevention – action that, where possible, stops health issues from emerging in the first place. Interventions such as HPV vaccine, support for pelvic floor health and access to and provision of a choice of contraception, including LARC methods, are all examples of primary prevention that can be life changing for women and girls and are an important part of the Women’s Health Plan.

Scotland’s Service Renewal Framework supports the next step, setting a framework for a health and social care system which supports and promotes secondary and tertiary prevention – early detection to support early intervention and then through tertiary prevention to minimise the harm of a health concern through careful management. Within the Women’s Health Plan, primary to tertiary prevention are central to ensuring the best possible health of women and girls in Scotland, optimising future health, as well as responding quickly to early signs of ill health or of crisis (for example, through earlier diagnosis and management of cervical cancer, or of heavy menstrual bleeding, endometriosis, PCOS and other menstrual health conditions).

Published in October 2025, the Scottish Health Information Integrity Strategy sets out the framework for safe, coherent, evidence-based and ethical approaches to address false and misleading health information.

The strategy is a blueprint for a national approach to ensure the general public have ready access to accurate information, that can help them to make decisions about their health and wellbeing. It seeks to link local on-the-ground efforts to national level, and while supporting trusted figures in our communities.

Detailed actions have been jointly agreed by the Scottish Government, Public Health Scotland and Education Scotland in consultation with the NHS and other stakeholders. This work will link to the action on hormone hesitance in Phase Two of the Women’s Health Plan and feedback from women and girls who want access to reliable and accurate health information, from trusted sources.