Improving menstrual health beyond product provision

The term ‘period poverty’ has dominated news stories for several years, normally within stories about girls missing school due to a lack of menstrual products. Non-governmental organisations and, more recently, governments have rushed to ‘address’ this problem through the provision of free menstrual materials. But menstrual health is multi-faceted; experiences of bleeding are driven by factors beyond physical resources and impacts go further than school attendance. In order to advocate for programmers and practitioners to approach menstrual health more holistically we reviewed all of the existing qualitative research on menstrual experiences in high income countries (104 studies met our inclusion criteria). We used this to develop a model of menstrual experience indicating salient pathways to negative (and occasionally positive) experiences and impacts.

In this presentation I will introduce the model and some of the key pathways through which negative experiences and impacts occur. The model can be (and has been) used for advocacy and by implementers to identify target areas for investment and policy.