Women's Health Plan - phase two 2026 to 2029: equality impact assessment

The Scope of the EQIA

Under the Equality Act 2010 (Scotland) public authorities must carry out an Equalities Impact Assessment (EQIA) as well as a general duty for listed public authorities to promote equality by advancing equality of opportunity, eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment and victimisation and foster good community relations between persons’ who share a protected characteristic and those who do not. To achieve this, the Scottish Government promotes a mainstreaming approach to equality to ensure that the impact of policies, programmes and legislation on groups of people who share a protected characteristic are assessed by all areas and at all levels.

This policy will primarily impact women and girls, and has the potential to affect all women in Scotland across their life course. However, the benefits of reducing health inequalities has the potential to directly and indirectly impact everyone in Scotland.

The Women’s Health Plan aims to take an intersectional approach, recognising that many women and girls in Scotland will face multiple inequalities and barriers to accessing good healthcare. These factors include the named protected characteristics in the Equality Act, and extend beyond, including: income, education, geography, culture and more. People experience different combinations of these factors, which has implications for the health inequalities that they are likely to experience.

While, for this purposes of this EQIA, each protected characteristic is presented separately it is acknowledged that women and girls often face multiple and/or interdependent inequalities. We hope that by taking an intersectional, holistic and life course approach in the development of this plan, inequalities experienced by women and girls will be better understood, addressed and reduced.

Approach

The Women’s Health Plan: Phase Two is an update to an existing policy. As such, this EQIA will focus on what has changed for women and girls in Scotland since the publication of the Women’s Health Plan in 2021.

Officials reviewed a number of recent and relevant reports and research papers. A list of the key resources and reports which have informed this plan can be found at Annex A.

Two reports are of particular importance to highlight:

• A ‘Review of the Data Landscape’ that sets out some of the routinely published data on women’s health currently available in Scotland and highlights key gaps.
• A Women's experiences of discrimination and the impact on health: research report, published in 2023, as part of the implementation of the 2021-23 Women’s Health Plan. This two-phase research project was carried out to build an evidence base on women’s health inequalities in Scotland. The findings in this project have contributed to the evidence base on women’s health inequalities, discrimination and young women through an in-depth exploration of women in Scotland’s intersectional experience.

Additionally, to ensure the views and experiences of women and girls were central to Phase Two, the Scottish Government commissioned 5 third sector organisations to carry out focus groups with the specific aim of hearing from women and girls who are often not heard from in the policy making process. This targeted approach was taken to ensure we heard from those with a diverse range of views and experiences. Focus groups were held by:

• Age Scotland
• British Heart Foundation Scotland
• Council of Ethnic Minority of Voluntary Organisations (CEMVO)
• Simon Community Scotland
• The Young Women’s Movement

A full summary report detailing findings from these focus groups is published alongside the Plan.