Health advice should be given on TikTok and Instagram as young people no longer read NHS leaflets, Women’s Health Ambassador said.
Professor Dame Lesley Regan warned that it is vital to share advice via social media to inform young women, girls and boys about issues such as unusually heavy periods.
He said it is “quite extraordinary” how “ignorant” young people are about their reproductive health due to a lack of education and because they have difficulty accessing information in traditional ways, such as reading leaflets.
Professor Dame Lesley Regan suggested young women should be able to watch TikTok videos explaining that “ovaries wear out”, to help them “take charge of their fertility”.
The government’s women’s health tsar, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at Imperial College London, said she had recently had to point out to a team at the Department of Health and Social Care that was designing an information campaign about periods. that none of the under-30 target audience would see it because it was written on paper.
“If we want to contact people under 35 years old… we have to give them information in the way they want, whether it’s on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook or Twitter (X),” he said.
“I think we have to move forward.” We have to give them (young women) the information they need and we have to give it to them in the way they want to receive it.
‘We have to embrace social media. Nowadays, people of my generation are a little afraid of him.’
Speaking today at a panel discussion on the future of women’s health in the House of Commons, hosted by medical technology firm Hologic, Dame Lesley also revealed that she checks her posts on X, formerly Twitter, in advance so as not to inadvertently saying something that would lead to her being ‘cancelled’.
Professor Ranee Thakar, president of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, agreed that “almost no one” reads the advice leaflets women receive during pregnancy.
He said the Government needs to “think outside the box” and consider using platforms such as TikTok.
“I think we focus a lot on paper information, when girls and young 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: almost no one reads those pamphlets.
“We need to offer information in a way that is acceptable, in a way that people want to see it.”
Dame Lesley said it is important for young women to 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 allow them to get the right help.
And he added: “It all starts with education, because it is extraordinary how ignorant young people are – and I am not saying this in a critical way – if they are not taught what normality is, they do not have a criterion with which they can judge what it is. the abnormality.’
He said both girls and boys should be taught that if the pain or level of bleeding from periods affected a person’s ability to live their normal daily life, then that was a problem and they should seek help.
The panel also revealed that gynecology waiting lists in England were among the longest, and Dr Thakar said this was largely because they were the first to be canceled and the last to be reinstated during the pandemic.
“We found that as women waited (on the list), their conditions, such as incontinence, prolapse or heavy bleeding, actually worsened and went from being (just) a physical problem to also becoming mental health problems,” he added.
