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# Government pledges £1.5 million for FemTech devices
- URL: https://med-techinsights.com/government-pledges-1-5-million-for-femtech-devices/
- Published: 2026-04-16T13:55:35.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-22T08:05:48.000Z
- Description: Chris Whitehouse, a political consultant and expert on medical technology policy and regulation at Whitehouse Communications, highlights the commitment to encourage FemTech as part of the government’s newly launched Women’s Health Strategy. The UK Government has pledged 1.5 million GBP to fund a new
- Author: Oliver Johnson
- Tags: Insights, Femtech, Policy & Regulation

###### [*Chris Whitehouse*](https://med-techinsights.com/tag/chris-whitehouse/)*, a political consultant and expert on medical technology policy and regulation at* [*Whitehouse Communications*](http://www.whitehousecomms.com/?ref=med-techinsights.com)*, highlights the commitment to encourage FemTech as part of the government’s newly launched Women’s Health Strategy.*

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The UK Government has pledged 1.5 million GBP to fund a new FemTech healthcare challenge, to provide grant awards to NHS systems to work with promising FemTech developers addressing areas of unmet need, with a focus on community service models addressing health inequalities.

The funding, included in the recently published [Women’s Health Strategy](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/renewed-womens-health-strategy-for-england?ref=med-techinsights.com), will enable the NHS to buy products, and critically to free up clinical and management capacity to transform pathways and ways of working to ensure innovations can be adopted to benefit women and support NHS activity. The examples will be evaluated, helping FemTech developers generate the evidence needed to spread adoption of their products across the NHS.

The Strategy commits government to “direct and deploy technology to benefit all women” arguing that in recent years there has been a significant expansion in new technologies aimed at women’s health and wellness, and pledging that as new devices are developed, improvements to the way NICE and the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency work together will speed up access, ensuring that they can be adopted in a more streamlined way.

Notably, the Strategy says, access to health technologies will be supported through a suite of changes including introducing a new National HealthTech Access Programme and an innovator passport to reduce barriers to spreading proven technologies across the NHS. However, given the longstanding inequity in access to finance and more widely a lack of focus on women’s health as a priority area, there are limited products with sufficient maturity of evidence to enable national evaluation, central funding, or supported rollout. The FemTech healthcare challenge is intended to address this challenge.

Much of the market is direct to consumer or branded as wellness products, and there is a risk that growth in FemTech will not sufficiently address areas of unmet clinical need, and consumer adoption will exacerbate health inequalities, warns the Strategy. Government, it says, intends to act to direct and support development and deployment so that FemTech supports the shift from hospitals to communities, addressing clinical challenges in women’s health and reducing health inequalities. 

*The Author used AI in preparing this article. Comments upon or questions about this article can be addressed to* [*chris.whitehouse@whitehousecomms.com*](mailto:chris.whitehouse@whitehousecomms.com)*.*