An Open Letter to the Incoming Prime Minister

On the Women's Health Strategy for England

Dear Mr Burnham,

As you choose your cabinet this weekend, I'm reaching out to you as an ordinary person who has lost hope in a system that has failed me. Years of being gaslit, begging to be taken seriously, pushing for tests, medication, anything to help the fight I've had with my own body.

It feels like my uterus is being scraped out with a rusty spoon.

I have an angry uterus. It's my affectionate term for the endometriosis and adenomyosis I live with.

And I don't say that lightly. My whole life is planned around my cycle. I spend it walking a tightrope with medication. Enough to take the edge off pain so soul-crushing it leaves me crying in a heap on the floor, but not so much that I'm too out of it to work. That's the choice. Function, or relief. Rarely both.

It took years to be believed. And I am one of the lucky ones. I at least have a name for what's wrong with me.

Because there are millions of other 'ordinary people' who placed their hope in that same system, and it's failed them too. People with endometriosis, adenomyosis, fibroids, vulvodynia.

A whole family of chronic pelvic pain conditions that are common, debilitating, and routinely waved away. Where the care you get is decided by your postcode, and by whether the first person you see has even heard of what's wrong with you.

Gynaecology waiting lists are the highest they have ever been. For endometriosis alone, a diagnosis takes an average of nine years and four months. For some of the others, there's barely a recognised pathway to wait on at all.

More than nine years. For a diagnosis. In 2026.

Imagine a condition so debilitating it permeates every part of your life, and the pain is the easy part to explain. It's the careers ended, the relationships strained, the one in six women who leave work entirely. We are not a minor inconvenience to the economy. We are being quietly written out of it.

I'm not asking you to cure it. We're a long way off knowing if that's even possible. I'm asking for something far more basic: that whoever you appoint as Health Secretary does what they already said they would.

Because the promises are written down. In April, the Women's Health Strategy for England was bold. It named gaslighting and medical misogyny out loud, and it was welcomed. It promised a proper standard of care and pain relief for procedures like coil fittings. It promised to tie hospitals' funding to whether women are actually listened to. It promised to “eliminate the diagnostic odyssey.”

And then it did none of it.

They found the right words, which is often the easy part. But we all know that actions speak louder. A resignation. A document with no update, no binding timelines, and no explanation of what “eliminate the diagnostic odyssey” is actually supposed to mean.

Every number is going the wrong way. Diagnosis times have got longer since 2020. The waiting lists keep growing. And the longest waits, of course, fall on women in the most deprived areas, and on Black and Asian women. The system isn't failing everyone equally. It never does.

I'm not the only one who noticed. Both Endometriosis UK and the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists welcomed the strategy, and both said the same thing: commitments have to be matched with a roadmap, resource and capacity. Without that, it's a document, not a change.

A promise with nothing behind it isn't a promise. It's a press release.

They wrote down everything we've been shouting for years, put it on government letterhead, and then let the machinery to deliver it simply not turn up. We've watched “priorities” announced and quietly shelved before. I am done being grateful for words. Words are free.

We needed action, and we needed it a decade ago. And it has to be specific. If you can't say what success looks like, you can't tell us when you've delivered it, and neither can we. So underpromise and overdeliver, for once. We have had a lifetime of the reverse.

You said the system doesn't work well enough for ordinary people. There is no clearer example than a woman told, for years, that her debilitating pain is normal.

And if you actually want to fix this, here's a radical idea: ask the people living it. There are thousands of us. Organised, informed, and frankly exhausted from becoming experts in conditions our own doctors couldn't name. We've done the research you haven't funded.

We know where the system breaks, because we're the ones it breaks on. So consult us. Put lived experience in the room where the decisions get made. You know where to find us. We're not hard to spot. We're the angry ones.

So here is what I'm asking. Don't let this be another beautifully-worded promise that outlives the person who signed it. Give whoever holds the health brief a mandate to publish a real, funded delivery plan, with actual pathways for endometriosis, adenomyosis and the chronic pelvic pain conditions this strategy named and then forgot. Do it in your first hundred days.

You promised to give people their hope back.

We're right here. Start with us.

Lindsey,

Founder, The Angry Uterus Club

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