Women’s Health: Cervical Screening Report August 2025

Healthwatch Redbridge started a Women’s Health Project in 2024, aiming to engage with and hear from all women about their experience and understanding of women’s health provision in Redbridge and use these insights to influence and affect change. 

The research project has been designed in 3 phases over 2024 – 2025:

• Phase 1: Cervical Screening  
• Phase 2: Breast Screening
• Phase 3: Perimenopause and Menopause 

In 2024, Healthwatch England asked local Healthwatch, including Healthwatch Redbridge (HWR) to interview women in Redbridge about their experiences as part of an investigation into declining cervical screening rates. 

As part of that research, HWR spoke to local women about their hesitancy to attend screenings their experiences at screenings and the impact on their health. 

Hearing how barriers including appointment letters, poor communication and misconceptions prevented women from different communities across Redbridge from attending, HWR believed that the important insights garnered from a small sample of women in our community highlighted issues that warranted further examination. 

Expanding on these initial conversations with local women, the research for Phase 1 consisted of extensive outreach and engagement work, visiting 17 community hubs to deliver presentations providing trusted health information, collaboration with health professionals and 48 in-depth interviews with women across Redbridge about their personal experiences of cervical screening.  

The report findings reveal barriers that will require system wide change, and co-operation from service providers and community organisations across Redbridge, at all levels. 

Key Findings

Invitation to screenings: The data collected from various global communities highlight significant disparities in cervical screening uptake. The findings recorded much lower response rates amongst Learning Disabled (LD) women (25%) and wheelchair users (40%) 

Translated Information: People from African/African Caribbean (36%), Bengali (22%), Romanian (66%) and Somali ethnicities (41%) stated they would want information in their own languages so they were more informed about the procedure and could make informed choices.

Improvement to provision of information: Over half of women (55%) from the LD community and wheelchair users reported there was lack of accessible information. 

Speculum Sizes: A third of all women interviewed (34%) reported that they did not know that different speculum sizes were available which could improve their overall screening experience.

Accessibility: Women who are wheelchair users reported a lack of reasonable access within practices and poor understanding of their conditions when communicating with health professionals.

Health Literacy: Most participants (91%) reported that health literacy was an issue, such as not knowing what Human Papillomavirus (HPV) was, and what the screening would look for.

Patient experience: Some individuals reported services having a poor approach to culturally sensitive beliefs and practices and lack of trauma informed care.

Home Testing Kits: Many participants (39%) reported they were willing to use home testing kits when they are rolled out by the NHS.