Health advice should be given on TikTok and Instagram as young people no longer read NHS leaflets, the Women’s Health Ambassador said.
Professor Dame Lesley Regan warned it is vital advice is shared via social media to inform young women, girls and boys about issues like unusually heavy periods.
She said it is ‘quite extraordinary’ how ‘ignorant’ young people are about their reproductive health because of a lack of education – and because they struggle to access information in traditional ways, like reading leaflets.
Professor Dame Lesley Regan suggested young women should be able to watch TikTok videos which explained to them that ‘ovaries get worn out’, to help them ‘take charge of their fertility’
The government’s women’s health tsar, a professor of obstetrics and gynaecology at Imperial College London, said she had recently had to point out to a Department of Health and Social Care team who were designing an information campaign about periods that none of the target audience of under-30s would see it because it was in written, paper form.
‘If we want to get hold of people who are less than 35 years of age… we need to give them information in the way they want, whether that’s on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter [X],’ she said.
‘I think we’ve got to get “with it”. We have to provide [young women] with the information they need and we have to deliver it to them in ways they want to receive it.
‘We have to embrace social media. Currently, people of my generation are a bit scared of it.’
Speaking at a panel discussion about the future of women’s health in the House of Commons today, hosted by the medical technology firm Hologic, Dame Lesley also revealed she gets her posts on X, formerly Twitter, checked in advance so she doesn’t inadvertently say something which would lead her to ‘get cancelled’.
Professor Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, agreed that ‘hardly anybody’ read the advice leaflets women were given during pregnancy.
She said the Government needs to ‘think outside the box’ and consider using platforms like TikTok.
‘I think we focus a lot on paper-based information, when young girls and women do not read paper-based information,’ she told the event.
‘If you look at the antenatal information that is given to mothers, it’s a whole lot of leaflets. And I will tell you: hardly anybody reads those leaflets.
‘We need to look at providing information in a way that is palatable, in a way that people want to look at it.’
Dame Lesley said it is important young women have access to information about what is normal and what is not when it comes to their reproductive health, because helping them understand their bodies would empower them to get the right help.
She added: ‘It starts with education because it is quite extraordinary how ignorant young people are – and I don’t mean that in any critical way – if they’re not taught about what normality is, they’ve got no yardstick by which they can judge what abnormality is.’
She said both girls and boys should be taught that if pain or the level of bleeding from periods affected someone’s ability to live their normal everyday life then that was a problem and they should seek help.
The panel also revealed gynaecology waiting lists in England were among the longest, with Dr Thakar saying this was largely because they were the first to be cancelled and the last to be reinstated during the pandemic.
‘We found that as women are waiting [on the list] their disease conditions, such as incontinence, prolapse or heavy bleeding, actually got worse and changed from being [just] a physical problem to mental health issues as well,’ she added.