Exciting News! A New Kind of GP Consultation for Women’s Health

For years, women have been told to wait.

Wait until the symptoms get worse.
Wait for an appointment.
Wait until it’s “clinically significant.”

And so women wait, often with fatigue, irregular cycles, unexplained anxiety, weight changes, brain fog, pain, or the quiet, persistent feeling that something isn’t quite right. Not urgent enough for A&E. Not specific enough for a specialist referral. But not nothing either.

This gap is where modern women’s healthcare loudly fails. And it’s exactly the space Hertility is trying to rebuild.

So, we’re introducing Women’s Health GP Consultations to close that gap.

Helping you bring your symptoms, test results and medical history into one joined-up consultation. It’s a space designed to give you clarity, not just reassurance, and a plan you can actually act on.

We’re bringing you a consultation with a GMC Registered GP trained women’s hormonal and reproductive health.

It’s medical care, informed by your test results, so you don’t have to start again.

A Women’s Health GP will be there to:

• interpret hormone results in the context of symptoms and history
• review thyroid function, anaemia, cycle irregularities, PMS, or PMDD
• support PCOS management
• Prescribe medication where appropriate
• decide when specialist referral is genuinely needed
• help patients prepare for NHS appointments with clarity and confidence

It’s general practice redesigned around women’s bodies and your lived experience.

Because these days, getting an appointment isn’t always the same as getting help

On paper, the NHS has never been busier. In August 2025 alone, there were over 27 million GP appointments in England, an increase of 11% per working day compared to pre-pandemic levels*. The demand is there. The doors are technically open.

But access doesn’t always equal care.

With short appointments and fragmented follow-ups make it hard to unpick complex hormonal symptoms. Many conditions don’t show up clearly in one blood test. Patterns take time and context matters. 

This isn’t a failure of clinicians. It’s a failure of design, shaped by decades of neglect in women’s health.

We can see women are falling through the cracks (it’s a tale as old as time)

In a Hertility survey of nearly 1,000 users. 

• 39% reported not feeling listened to by healthcare professionals
• 33% said their symptoms were dismissed
• 34% didn’t know where to turn next.

Crucially, these were not stories of advanced disease or specialist-level cases. They were stories of everyday medical uncertainty:

• irregular or painful cycles
• thyroid symptoms
• suspected PCOS
• anaemia
• unexplained fatigue or hormonal changes

These are conditions and symptoms woven into daily life, not medical outliers. They sit firmly within the scope of good general practice when time, expertise, and continuity are available.

There’s a serious diagnosis to treatment gap

Even when women do receive a diagnosis, care often stalls.

Among Hertility users with known conditions such as PCOS, thyroid disorders, fibroids, or anaemia:

• 45% were not undergoing any treatment or investigation
• 30% had previous investigations but no active care
• 15% were waiting for NHS follow-up

This is not a failure of specialist medicine. It is the absence of ownership in the middle. Someone to say: this matters. This can be treated. Or this can safely be monitored.

And while NHS diagnostic and treatment backlogs continue, with 24% of patients waiting over six weeks for diagnostic tests* and referral-to-treatment targets unmet since 2016, many women are left in limbo. Unsure whether to push, pause, or escalate.

How Hertility is building women’s healthcare differently

We founded Hertility because we’d seen first-hand how often women’s health concerns are dismissed, delayed, or oversimplified. Too often, symptoms are looked at in isolation. Too often, women are told everything is “normal” without anyone taking the time to explain what that actually means for them.

By combining diagnostics, hormone-literate clinicians, and now, ongoing GP care, we’re creating a more reliable path from results to action.

It’s the difference between being told “everything looks normal” and being helped to understand what normal means for you.

What Women Actually Want From Care (It’s Simpler Than You Think)

For many women, we hear the most powerful part of healthcare isn’t always the diagnosis or even the treatment. It’s being believed, understood, and guided toward the right next steps.

We know that the future of women’s health won’t be built on apps alone, or tests alone, or even specialists alone. It will be built in the spaces between. Where insight becomes action. Where long-ignored conditions finally meet real medical solutions.

Our new Women’s Health GP service isn’t about replacing what exists. It’s about rebuilding care in a way that finally works for women.

In a world capable of extraordinary scientific progress, it shouldn’t be radical to expect clear pathways for conditions that affect 51% of the population. 

We’re tired of waiting, so we’re building the future ourselves.

From Deirdre O’Neill, Dr Helen O’Neill and Dr Natalie Getreu x

Sources: https://researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/documents/CBP-7281/CBP-7281.pdf