News £25 million for women’s health hub expansion
Women across England will benefit from tailored healthcare and support by new women’s health hubs – improving access and quality of care for services for menstrual problems, contraception, pelvic pain, menopause care and more. A £25 million investment over the next two years will accelerate the development of new women’s health hubs to benefit women across England and help to ease pressures facing the NHS. The hub models will be tailored to meet local women’s needs. They will focus on delivering services in the community that better fit around women’s lives and streamline access to women’s health services. Hubs aim to address fragmentation in provision, for example by providing management of contraception and heavy bleeding in one visit, or integrating cervical screening with other aspects of women’s health care. At the moment, women often need to attend multiple appointments and go to different places to access these essential services. As well as improving women’s experiences
of healthcare, hubs can create longer-term savings for the NHS through improving access to preventative care and reducing pressure on secondary care services. Minister for Women’s Health, Maria Caulfield,
said: “Women make up 51% of the population and should not be an afterthought in healthcare. Better access to specialist services is key to tackling health inequalities - the £25 million funding will create new women’s health hubs providing specialist care and advice to women across the country.
pathways for local adoption, case studies and a cost benefit analysis. This will be published in due course. Expanding women’s health hubs is one of Ministers’ top priorities for the first year of implementing the Women’s Health Strategy. The eight priorities are: 1. Encouraging expansion of women’s health hubs to improve women’s access to services and to create efficiencies for the NHS.
“We are making excellent headway to meet our commitments set out in England’s first ever Women’s Health Strategy, aiming to boost the health and wellbeing of women and girls.” Early adopter women’s health hubs already exist
in England including in Liverpool and Manchester. These have been well received by women in their area and are offering a significant increase in appointments for long-acting reversible contraception, alongside other services such as menstrual health, menopause, and pelvic floor care. Expanding women’s health hubs across England is a key commitment in the first ever Government-led Women’s Health Strategy for England, with an initial aim to see at least one hub in every integrated care system (ICS). The Department of Health and Social Care is working collaboratively with stakeholders across the health and care system to develop resources to support local creation of women’s health hubs, including a best practice guide, possible care
2. Improving information provision on women’s health, including improvements to the NHS website and supporting teachers to deliver women’s health elements of the relationships and sex curriculum.
3. Supporting women’s health in the workplace, including through the Health and Wellbeing Fund 2022 to 2025.
4. Pregnancy loss, including through reporting findings of the independent Pregnancy Loss Review and developing the pregnancy loss certificate.
5. Fertility, including improving access to NHS fertility treatment for female same-sex couples and assessing the use of non-clinical access criteria locally.
6. Improving access to hormone replacement therapy (HRT) by introducing the HRT prescription prepayment certificate in April 2023 and boosting HRT supply.
7. Healthy ageing and long-term conditions - with work feeding into the Government’s forthcoming major conditions strategy.
8. Boosting research and evidence into women’s health.
World first for robotic surgery at Guy’s and St Thomas’
A team from Guy’s and St Thomas’ have become the first in the world to operate through a patient’s mouth using the Versius robotic surgery system. This less invasive approach, known as transoral robotic surgery (TORS), can remove cancerous and benign tumours growing in the mouth and throat and speed up the patient’s recovery time. The technique is well established but has never been performed with this newer surgical robot. The Versius robot has previously been used to treat
urology patients, but as part of a research study by Guy’s and St Thomas’ and King’s College London, it has now been used for TORS. So far, ten patients have been treated with Versius using this technique. The Versius robotic system consists of four modular robotic arms and is designed and built in Cambridge by CMR Surgical. During a robotic procedure, surgeons control the robotic instruments while sitting at an open console in the same room with a 3D HD view. One of the robotic arms controls a
camera, to see inside the patient. Guy’s and St Thomas’ robotic head and neck
surgery lead, Mr Asit Arora, said: “Going through the mouth with a robotic system allows surgeons to safely operate in a tight, small space which is surrounded by important blood vessels and nerves. “The Versius robot uses miniaturised surgical instruments that are perfect in such a small
operating space. In addition to the enhanced 3D view, Versius allows the surgeon to make relatively big movements on the console that can be scaled down to allow precise, small movements in the operative space. Before TORS, we would have had to have done bigger, more invasive operations with a much longer recovery time for our patients.” For some patients, the minimally invasive
approach can mean they need smaller doses of further treatments like radiotherapy or chemotherapy, or it may result in them avoiding the need for additional treatments altogether. The configuration of Versius to be able to operate
through the mouth was made possible thanks to a PhD study by head and neck research fellow, Jack Faulkner, supervised by Mr Arora and Professor Sebastien Ourselin, head of School of Biomedical Engineering and Imaging Sciences at King’s College London. It was a project that brought together clinical, academic and industry partners.
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