Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask His Majesty's Government what steps they are taking to ensure that the Women's Health Strategy’s commitment to tackling medical misogyny includes a review of the language used in women's surgical procedures

The Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England, published in April 2026, places tackling medical misogyny at its core, recognising that women have been dismissed for far too long and that this must change. The strategy takes a systemic approach to addressing medical misogyny and ensuring women’s voices and experiences shape care. This includes putting women’s lived experience, including pain and whether they felt listened to, at the heart of how National Health Service quality is defined, measured, and improved.

Authority over established clinical terms sits at several levels. International bodies maintain the formal terminology, classification, and coding systems used in clinical records, including the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Diseases.

At a national level, NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the royal colleges, coding bodies, and professional societies set the terms used in guidance, patient information, pathways, and records. A change to established clinical terms would require agreement across these national and international professional and classification bodies.