Government needs to ‘deal with it’ and use TikTok and Instagram to provide health advice because young people aren’t reading NHS leaflets, says Women’s Health Ambassador

Health advice should be given on TikTok and Instagram as young people no longer read NHS leaflets, the Women’s Health Ambassador has said.

Professor Dame Lesley Regan warned that it is vital that advice is shared on social media to inform young women, girls and boys about issues such as unusually heavy periods.

She said it is “quite extraordinary” how “ignorant” young people are about their reproductive health due to a lack of education – and because they struggle to access information through traditional ways such as reading leaflets.

The government’s women’s health tsar, professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, said she should have recently alerted a team from the Department of Health and Social Care to an information campaign about periods that none of the target groups of under-30s would see it because it was in written, paper form.

“If we want to reach people under 35… 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 should ‘go with it’. We need to provide (young women) with the information they need and we need to get that information to them in the way they want to receive it.

‘We need to embrace social media. At the moment, people of my generation are a bit afraid of it.’

During a panel discussion on the future of women’s health in the House of Commons today, hosted by medical technology company Hologic, Dame Lesley also revealed that her posts on lead to it being ‘cancelled’.

Professor Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, agreed that ‘almost no one’ read the advice leaflets given to women during pregnancy.

She said the government should “think outside the box” and consider using platforms like TikTok.

“I think we focus a lot on paper information, while young girls and women don’t read paper information,” she said at the event.

‘If you look at the prenatal information given to mothers, it’s a lot of leaflets. And I’ll tell you: hardly anyone reads those brochures.

“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 that young women have access to information about what is normal and what is not when it comes to their reproductive health, as helping them understand their bodies would enable them to get the right help.

She added: ‘It starts with education, because it’s extraordinary how ignorant young people are – and I don’t mean that in a critical way – if they don’t learn what normality is, they have no benchmark to live up to. they can judge what an abnormality is.’

She said that both girls and boys should be taught that if pain or the amount of bleeding during menstruation affects a person’s ability to live a normal daily life, then that is a problem and they should seek help.

The panel also revealed that gynecology waiting lists in England were among the longest, with Dr Thakar saying this was largely because they were the first to be canceled and the last to be reinstated during the pandemic.

“We found that while women waited (for the list), their disease conditions, such as incontinence, prolapse or heavy bleeding, actually worsened and changed from (just) a physical problem to mental health problems,” she added.