Blog by Dr Cleodie Swire, in collaboration with Professor Catriona Waitt, and Dr Anita Banerjee from the BPS Medications in Pregnancy and Breastfeeding Working Group
Our view on the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy
Last week the Government set out the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England (April 2026) which includes an action plan to improve the health of women across the lifecycle. It lays out inadequacies in current health outcomes – including a 2.5 year reduction in women’s healthy life expectancy between 2019-2021 and 2022-2024 – and describes 117 actions aimed to address these. This aligns with the 10 Year Health Plan and the three shifts, by changing focus from sickness to prevention, narrowing the gaps in heart disease, obesity, and levels of smoking and drinking. Moving more of women’s healthcare into the community from the hospital, and switching from analogue to digital, should make it possible for clinical teams to identify and monitor conditions and to offer early advice and interventions. We welcome this.
There are many areas of agreement between the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy for England and the recently published BPS position statement on medication use in pregnancy and breastfeeding, including research and funding for female-specific issues. Actions within the renewed strategy speak to the promotion of research, funding for areas of unmet need and improving information provision, all of which align with the BPS position statement. While the renewed strategy does not explicitly mention medication use in pregnancy and breastfeeding, we wish to emphasise that these are essential considerations during the pre-pregnancy and postpartum period. We welcome more funding in these areas and addressing the associated unmet needs.
The urgent need for pregnancy and breastfeeding-inclusive research
The BPS position statement, published in March 2026, was developed by a working group of international experts. It highlights that data on dosing, safety and efficacy are lacking for many medications in pregnancy and lactation. Variable interpretation occurs when data are sparse or absent, leading to women receiving inconsistent and confusing information. Our position statement lays out recommendations to improve this situation, aiming to ensure that every woman can make an individualised decision about medication use in pregnancy and breastfeeding based on evidence-based information.
Four out of five women are estimated to use a medication in pregnancy in the UK. Medication use for chronic health issues in the peripartum period is increasing, driven by factors including increasing maternal age and co-morbidity. Positive impacts of well-managed health conditions extend beyond the peripartum period for both mother and baby. There is increasing global recognition of the need to improve practices relating to medication use in pregnancy and breastfeeding, such as recent work on the updated ICH E21 guideline on inclusion of pregnant and breastfeeding individuals in clinical trials.
It is important that this topic remains a priority in England too, and that the actions laid out in the Women’s Health Strategy are used to address the issues as recommended in our position statement.
