The Government is committed to improving care for women with uterine fibroids, and to reducing the inequalities in diagnosis and treatment that Black women experience.

Reducing inequalities is hard‑wired throughout the recently published Renewed Women’s Health Strategy. Actions in the strategy are targeted by deprivation, ethnicity, and unmet need, with a focus on marginalised women, community‑based services, neighbourhood health models, and transparent data.

The strategy commits to ending long diagnostic delays for conditions such as fibroids, by improving early assessment and access to care. It recognises heavy periods as an early warning sign of fibroids and that failure to act early leads to avoidable pain and delayed diagnosis. Specifically, the strategy commits to:

• better education for girls and women about what is normal, what is not, and when to seek help for heavy or painful periods. This is backed by an additional £1 million of investment to support targeted work in schools and community settings to support girls’ knowledge about menstrual health. This is an important factor to delays in diagnosis and treatment for fibroids;
• redesigning clinical pathways for menstrual problems, including those caused by fibroids to reduce repeat appointments and fragmented care;
• delivering care, including for fibroids, through community and neighbourhood‑based services, supported by single points of access for gynaecology referrals; and
• develop and implement new patient-reported experience measures and, where appropriate, patient-reported outcome measures, for key women’s health pathways over the next five years, which will given women a direct voice in how these services improve.

Additionally, menstrual problems, which could be a sign of fibroids, are included within the first high‑priority pathways to be supported through the new virtual hospital, NHS Online, from 2027, giving women faster access to advice and treatment if they choose digital routes.

NHS England is also due to publish an equity good practice guide to enable integrated care boards to better understand and reduce inequalities in heavy periods and menopause for women from Black and minority ethnic backgrounds.

Earlier diagnosis and better access to the full range of treatment options are central to giving women genuine choice in regard to hysterectomies. Where fibroids are identified sooner, women can be offered less invasive treatments before surgery becomes necessary. Shared decision making and informed consent mean that hysterectomy should be a fully informed choice, not a default.

International bodies maintain the formal terminology, classification, and coding systems used in clinical records, including the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Diseases.

At national level, NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the royal colleges, coding bodies, and professional societies set the terms used in guidance, patient information, pathways, and records. NHS England is not able to rename procedures across consent forms, clinical guidelines, records, and coding as changes to established clinical terms would require agreement across the national and international professional and classification bodies.

No national assessment has been made. Hysterectomy is the established medical term for the surgical removal of the uterus. A change to an established term of this kind would require agreement across the national and international professional and classification bodies.

As with all procedures, healthcare professionals are expected to fully explain the procedure in advance, including expected symptoms, side effects, and risks. These conversations should be undertaken using a shared decision-making approach that ensures individuals are supported to make decisions that are right for them. NHS England has published guidance on the use of shared decision making, which is available on the NHS England website, under personalised care.

As part of the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy, we will co-produce with women a standard of care for the delivery of gynaecological procedures, ensuring all women give informed consent and are offered a choice of pain relief.

In 2024/25, 44,348 hysterectomy procedures were conducted in English National Health Service hospitals and as part of English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector.

No national assessment has been made. Hysterectomy is the established medical term for the surgical removal of the uterus. A change to an established term of this kind would require agreement across the national and international professional and classification bodies.

As with all procedures, healthcare professionals are expected to fully explain the procedure in advance, including expected symptoms, side effects, and risks. These conversations should be undertaken using a shared decision-making approach that ensures individuals are supported to make decisions that are right for them. NHS England has published guidance on the use of shared decision making, which is available on the NHS England website, under personalised care.

As part of the Renewed Women’s Health Strategy, we will co-produce with women a standard of care for the delivery of gynaecological procedures, ensuring all women give informed consent and are offered a choice of pain relief.

In 2024/25, 44,348 hysterectomy procedures were conducted in English National Health Service hospitals and as part of English NHS commissioned activity in the independent sector.

There are currently no plans to replace the term ‘hysterectomy’ with ‘uterectomy’ in National Health Service patient materials.

International bodies maintain the formal terminology, classification, and coding systems used in clinical records, including the Systematised Nomenclature of Medicine Clinical Terms and the World Health Organisation's International Classification of Diseases.

At a national level, NHS England, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the royal colleges, coding bodies, and professional societies set the terms used in guidance, patient information, pathways, and records. NHS England is not able to rename the procedure across consent forms, clinical guidelines, records, and coding as a change to an established clinical term of this kind would require agreement across the national and international professional and classification bodies.

The Delivery Plan for Tackling the COVID-19 Backlog of Elective Care outlines how the National Health Service will bring down waiting times across all elective services. The plan does not prioritise specialties or certain interventions, but the NHS continues to focus on reducing the longest waiting times and providing high levels of support and scrutiny, targeted at the trusts which have the highest number of patients waiting the longest time, for elective treatment.

To support this plan and tackle waiting lists, including those in gynaecology, the Government plans to spend more than £8 billion from 2022/23 to 2024/25 to drive up and protect elective activity. We are also increasing capacity, including for gynaecological surgery, through our surgical hubs, delivered by the Getting It Right First Time’s High Volume Low Complexity programme.

Reports of non-voluntary hysterectomies being performed on immigrant women in ICE detention facilities are deeply worrying. We understand that members of Congress have already raised this issue with the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). We will continue to monitor the situation including any formal response from DHS.

This information is not available in the format requested.

The attached table shows information concerning the number of finished consultant episodes for the years 2008-09 to 2012-13.

The information has been placed in the Library.

There is some evidence that poor women in India are misled to undergo hysterectomy by doctors in the largely unregulated private sector. UK aid supported health programmes are helping state Governments to regulate private healthcare providers and give health advice to poor women so that coercion in health services is less likely to happen.

The number of finished admission episodes and mean and median time waited (days) for each NHS hospital provider in the London strategic

health authority (SHA) area for hip replacement, hysterectomy and cataract removal procedures during 2010-11 and 2011-12 is shown in the following tables.

The number of finished admission episodes (FAEs) and mean and median time waited for hip replacement, hysterectomy and cataract removal procedures during 2010-11 and 2011-12 for North West London Hospitals NHS Trust and London Strategic Health Authority is shown in the following table.

The number of finished admissions episodes (FAEs) and mean and median time waited (days) for hip replacement, hysterectomy and cataract removal procedures during 2010-11 at North West London Hospitals NHS trust is shown in the following table. Data for 2011-12 are not yet available and will be published in due course.