The advocacy achievements around PMOS land at a moment of broader change in the UK. The NHS’s Renewed Women’s Health Strategy in England explicitly acknowledges that women have too often been dismissed, misunderstood or left navigating fragmented care. Its ambition is to improve access, reduce delays and ensure women’s voices are at the centre of decision-making.

The Strategy was widely welcomed as an important and necessary policy framework, but policy alone does not change experience.

Experience is shaped not just by health appointments, but by the moments in between. Women’s experience of healthcare is based on how people understand their symptoms, how confident they feel seeking help and whether the information they encounter reflects their reality, is accurate and accessible.

Too often, the language used in healthcare has created distance rather than clarity. Clinical terminology that prioritises precision over relatability, or euphemistic phrasing designed to avoid discomfort, can leave women feeling uncertain or unheard. The result is a disconnect between evidence and everyday experience and women look for answers elsewhere. It is here that healthcare communications plays a defining role.

Today of course, that ‘elsewhere’ is often online. Women are turning to search engines, social platforms, health forums and, increasingly, large language models for information. In many cases, these channels feel more accessible and more responsive than formal healthcare settings and communication.

The digital environment presents its own challenges. The Censorship Revealed white paper from CensHERship highlights the widespread suppression of medically accurate women’s health content across major platforms. Topics such as menstruation, menopause, fertility and sexual health are frequently restricted or misclassified as inappropriate. As a result, creators, women’s health organisations and brands often self-censor.

This creates a difficult balance. Speak plainly and risk restriction or soften language and lose relevance. Either way, the outcome is similar: information that feels coded or disconnected from real experience.

Effective health communicators already recognise how contemporary best practice taps into the power of listening, language and location.

First, moving from one-way education to dialogue and listening to women. Co-creation, lived-experience insight and iterative feedback are essential if communications are to resonate and build trust.

Second, prioritising clarity over convention. Language should reflect how women describe their own experiences, not just how conditions are defined clinically.
Third, working within constraints without surrendering meaning. Regulation and platform policies are real, but they should not result in communication so sanitised that it becomes ineffective.

Fourth, optimise communications for locations where women are looking for information. Asking a question on an AI platforms and large language models (eg, Gemini or ChatGPT) is often the first step in a healthcare journey. With 69% of searches now ending without a click, earned content must be optimised for generative search.

The Renewed Women’s Health Strategy provides a clear signal of intent that women should be heard, believed and supported within the healthcare system.

The shift from PCOS to PMOS shows what happens when that intent is applied practically and by listening to experts. By experts, I mean women, researchers and physicians.

For everyone involved in the implementation of the Strategy, as well as health communicators more generally, this means more thoughtful and deliberate use of language. Language is powerful. If it can delay diagnosis and reinforce stigma, it can also do the opposite.

Language, effectively communicated, means that women do not just see change on paper as part of a policy strategy, but experience it in practice.