Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland has launched a three-year Women’s Health Plan setting out actions to improve prevention, diagnosis, treatment and support for women in Scotland.

The 2026 to 2029 plan includes commitments on health information, prevention and early detection, professional training, peer support, post-diagnosis care, policy and research.

It comes amid disparities affecting women with chest, heart and stroke conditions, including differences in diagnosis, testing and treatment.

Figures cited by the charity show women in Scotland are 50 per cent more likely than men to receive an initial misdiagnosis after a heart attack.

Jane-Claire Judson, chief executive of Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland, said: “Women have been telling us for years that their symptoms aren’t being taken seriously, and the evidence backs them up.

“When we talk about women’s health, we need to look beyond reproductive and maternal health alone.

“Women experience inequalities across a wide range of conditions, including chest, heart, stroke and Long Covid conditions, and they deserve equitable access to the information, support and care they need.

“Our CHSS Women’s Health Plan is about listening to those experiences and turning them into meaningful action.”

Across the UK, women are twice as likely to be misdiagnosed with heart failure, with many waiting an average of 20 weeks for a diagnosis, compared with 3.6 weeks for men.

There are more than 4,600 incidences of stroke in women in Scotland each year, with more than 1,200 dying as a result.

Asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) are also more common among women, while women are nearly twice as likely as men to die from asthma.

Women are less likely to be offered diagnostic testing within 72 hours of a heart attack and less likely to be prescribed medication that reduces the risk of a second heart attack, according to the charity.

CHSS also said conditions that predominantly affect women, including Long Covid and heart conditions such as coronary microvascular dysfunction, remain under-researched and under-diagnosed.

Four in five women say they are not listened to by healthcare professionals, while UK female life expectancy has fallen from 20th to 26th place among 38 OECD countries in recent years.

The Women’s Health Plan includes developing women-specific health information and launching a prevention and early detection programme through CHSS’s Health Defence and Community Healthcare Support Service.

Other commitments include raising the visibility of women’s health, strengthening training for healthcare professionals, CHSS colleagues and volunteers, expanding peer support and post-diagnosis care, and campaigning for changes to policy, funding and women’s inclusion in research.

The charity also plans to drive continuous improvement in its women’s health work, shaped by lived experience.

CHSS said it will seek to address inequalities through prevention programmes, professional education, policy influence and improved support for women across Scotland.

The plan builds on CHSS’s women’s health work launched in 2021 and its wider No Life Half Lived strategy. It also aligns with phases one and two of the Scottish Government’s Women’s Health Plan.

More than 140 responses to a national survey helped shape the plan, alongside consultation with health and social care professionals and people with lived experience through CHSS’s Voices of Experience Panel.

Judson said: “By improving awareness, supporting earlier detection and diagnosis, and ensuring women are heard when they seek help, we can begin to address inequalities that have persisted for far too long.

“Our first plan, launched in 2021, established important foundations.

“This next phase builds on that progress and reflects our commitment to a Scotland, where nobody is left behind because of their sex or gender.

“At Chest Heart & Stroke Scotland, our No Life Half Lived mission means working towards a future where everyone can live well with their condition. By bringing together women with lived experience, health professionals, policymakers and partners, we can create lasting change and help build a fairer, healthier Scotland for women.”

Women with the same medical conditions as men were less likely to receive the same treatment across several specialties, a global research review found.

The review found differences in care for conditions including cardiovascular disease, kidney disease and Parkinson’s, with women less likely to receive some active treatments.

Of 38 studies analysed, 33 found women were less likely than men to be offered active treatment.

Researchers at the University of St Andrews found women with myocardial infarction, heart failure or an irregular heartbeat were more likely to receive medication, while men were more likely to undergo coronary bypass surgery, stenting or other surgical treatment.

Women were also less likely to be prescribed statins.

Men with Parkinson’s were more likely to be referred for deep brain stimulation.

Men with liver failure were more likely to receive a transplant, while women with kidney disease requiring dialysis were less likely to receive permanent access and spent longer using a catheter.

Women were also less likely to receive opioids for pain management.

The researchers found no significant difference between women and men in treatment for stroke or diabetes, while women were more likely to receive treatment for dementia.

None of the studies identified clinical guidelines recommending different treatment based on sex.

Researchers said this suggested the differences could not be explained by the need for different clinical approaches to women’s health.

Dr Andrew O’Malley, who co-led the study, said: “For clinicians, the findings are a prompt to check whether treatment is being offered on clinical grounds rather than assumption.”

He said studies showed doctors more often attributed women’s symptoms to anxiety and made more diagnostic errors with female patients, even when test results were positive.

Dr Miriam Veenhuizen, honorary lecturer in the School of Medicine at St Andrews, said: “While the direction of the findings was not a surprise, the consistency was. The same pattern appeared in cardiology, surgery, transplant medicine and emergency care, and it survived statistical adjustment in most studies.”

Menopause is often absent from women’s electronic health records, a study of nearly 396,000 women has found.

Researchers found menopause appeared almost seven times more often in participant surveys than in electronic health records (EHRs).

The findings suggest important reproductive health information, including age at menopause, may often be missing from health records used for research.

Audrey Hendricks, associate professor of bioinformatics at CU Anschutz and the study’s principal investigator, said: “Ultimately, we cannot study what we do not measure. We cannot treat what we do not know.

“Menopause has enormous implications for women’s health, but if we don’t consistently capture when menopause occurs and other important reproductive health information, we limit our ability to understand how this transition affects disease risk and health outcomes.”

Researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz analysed data from women taking part in the National Institutes of Health’s All of Us Research Program.

They compared menopause information reported by participants in surveys with menopause diagnoses recorded in their electronic health records.

Around 193,000 menopause observations were identified in survey data, compared with approximately 28,000 diagnoses in EHR data.

Menopause was documented in electronic health records for only about 7 per cent of women in the dataset.

Nearly all participants with a menopause diagnosis recorded in their EHR also reported menopause in survey data. However, substantially fewer women had menopause documented in their health records.

Other important information was also frequently unavailable, including age at menopause, which researchers may use when examining links between menopause and chronic disease risk.

Menopause is a physiological transition that can affect cardiometabolic health and many other aspects of women’s health.

Researchers said relatively little is known about how factors including the timing and type of menopause influence health outcomes across diverse populations.

Large-scale programmes such as All of Us combine participant surveys, electronic health records and genomic data, but menopause-related research depends on relevant reproductive health information being available.

Missing menopause information can make it harder to investigate how the transition relates to health and disease.

The findings may also help researchers using All of Us data define menopause-related study populations, design studies and estimate how many participants are needed.

Hendricks said: “We have an enormous opportunity to use large-scale datasets to understand women’s health across the menopause transition and to identify who may be at greater risk for disease.

“But we need to make sure that the information researchers need is actually being collected.

“We must do a better job of capturing women’s health information, including reproductive health and measures related to menopause.”

Researchers said more complete and consistent collection of menopause and reproductive health information could help future studies examine factors such as age at menopause and their relationship with disease risk and health outcomes.