‘How can we make sure all women have equal access to sanitary products?’

Recognising that women from a variety of communities struggle to afford and access sanitary products, LBHF public health commissioned insight work to inform their strategic response.

Their goal was to develop a layered understanding of this sensitive topic, how it affected women in their borough and how to talk about it in the future.

We sensitively connected with women in various degrees of period poverty, understanding their needs and barriers to uptake of any potential service.

Our recommendations help clarify this highly complex topic, giving the borough clear guidance on what they needed to set the bar on this issue. We found that while many campaigners on period poverty were keen to ‘shout about period poverty’, the women actually affected by the situation were not. Our research made clear that women in question did not want to ‘celebrate periods’ and that gritty imagery approaches did not resonate well. Instead, we discovered that a quiet campaign to raise awareness of low-key services was needed. And in order to reduce barriers to engagement, language needed to move away from ‘poverty’ and instead adopt a common-sense tone of ‘every woman’s right’.