Is Anyone Actually Listening? The Health Secretary's Statement and the Question It Doesn't Ask
Apr 15, 2026
On 14 April 2026, the Health Secretary spoke to the press ahead of publishing the renewed Women's Health Strategy.
What he said was not new. But it mattered that he said it.
The NHS "too often gaslights women, treating their pain as an inconvenience and their symptoms as an overreaction." The system is "failing women." At the heart of these failures is, in his own words, "a systematic failure to listen to women."
Those are not the words of a campaigner or a whistleblower. They are the words of the Cabinet minister responsible for the NHS, published on the official government record, with 117 action points attached.
I want to ask a question today that the strategy does not ask.
If institution after institution has a systematic failure to listen to women and children — who is actually listening?
What the record shows
The renewed Women's Health Strategy is not the first time this failure has been named. In March 2026, the Women and Equalities Committee published a report finding that gynaecological and menstrual health had not been sufficiently prioritised, that women were facing "medical misogyny", and that nearly half a million women were on hospital gynaecology waiting lists — 85% of whom did not need to be there. There were effective treatments available. The system was not offering them.
Women with endometriosis now wait an average of nine years and four months for a diagnosis, rising to eleven years for women from diverse ethnic communities, for a condition they have been describing to doctors throughout that time.
In 2022, the Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse documented that health services consistently failed to share safeguarding information. Children were seen in GP surgeries, sexual health clinics, maternity services, emergency departments. Their abuse was visible. The institution looked away.
The IICSA's central finding was structural. Across every sector it examined, health, the church, local authorities, residential schools, institutions consistently prioritised their own reputation over the welfare of children. Not individual bad actors. A structural outcome of systems that had never been required to place the child above their own interests.
In 2022, the MacAlister Independent Review of Children's Social Care found that the child protection framework was not designed to address harms outside the home. Children placed in care because they needed protection were being failed again by the system responsible for them.
In 2020, the Ministry of Justice's own Harm Report found that mothers raising safeguarding concerns in family courts were being systematically mislabelled as the danger. The concern became evidence against the person raising it. The child's voice disappeared from the record.
Four bodies of evidence. Different institutions. Different years. The same finding.
Women and children are raising concerns. The concerns are managed rather than heard. The institution is protected rather than scrutinised. The person raising the concern bears the cost.
So who is listening?
Today's strategy promises that no woman will be left fighting to be heard. That is a worthy commitment. I hope it holds.
But while I read it, I kept thinking about what listening actually looks like when it works. Not as a pledge. As a practice.
Listening that works does not begin with an agenda. It does not assess the person speaking before deciding whether what they say is worth hearing. It does not filter the response through the institution's interests. It creates the conditions in which the person in front of you can say what is true, and trusts that the truth is worth hearing.
I know what that looks like because I used not as part of a government strategy, but in a classroom. With children. Starting with my son over FaceTime.
In nine schools across Bradford and Gloucestershire, 465 children were given one thing: permission to tell their story without correction, without assessment, without an adult deciding in advance whether what they had to say was good enough. The result was 100% engagement and zero behavioural incidents. Not because the children were exceptional. Because they were heard.
The British Psychological Society heard the research.UNICEF considered the methodology for international deployment. Parliament accepted my evidence.
None of that happened because an institution decided to listen. It happened because we built something that demonstrated what listening produces.
The question worth sitting with today
Wes Streeting is right that the NHS has a systematic failure to listen to women. He is right that it needs to change.
But the strategy he published today is an institutional response to an institutional failure. Institutions respond to institutional pressure. They write strategies. They commission reviews. They publish 117 action points.
What they do not do easily, what the record shows they have consistently failed to do, is hear the person in front of them before the system has already decided what to do with what that person says.
The women who needed today's strategy ten years ago are still waiting for an answer to that.
The children who needed someone to listen are still waiting too.
The question I am sitting with today is not whether the strategy is welcome. It is. The question is what we build in the meantime, for the people the strategy has not yet reached.
References
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2026/apr/14/wes-streeting-women-nhs-england-health-strategy
