It was only when I moved to Australia that I realised quite how lonely my experience of navigating the NHS had been. “You definitely shouldn’t be putting up with this,” the first doctor I saw in Sydney told me as I talked him through my headaches, the crushing fatigue and the heavy, debilitating periods that left me housebound for at least one day a month.

“You know this isn’t normal,” he added as I told him about the awkward outfit changes at work and the painful bloating that made me look 12 weeks pregnant. Calmly, he talked me through the next steps, which involved keeping a symptoms log, looking into the possibility that it might be adenomyosis, a uterus condition often referred to as endometriosis’s ‘evil sister’, and thinking about possible treatment options.

“I see women putting up with horrific levels of pain every day in this job,” he continued. “I’m going to help you fix this.” 

That should have been the natural response of any GP on hearing the severity of my symptoms. Why wouldn’t they want to help me fix something that left me unable to go to work for two days out of 28? Yet his reaction had me voice-noting friends back in the UK in disbelief. After years of being made to feel close to madness (was I overreacting? Did I just have a poor pain tolerance?), this man had given me two things I’d longed for: patience and compassion. For once, it felt like a doctor had all the time in the world to hear me out; why did I have to move to the other side of the world to experience that? The appointment had been no longer than 15 minutes, and this doctor was also from the UK – so why had our conversation played out so differently to those back at home?

Like many burnt-out Brits, I’d relocated to Australia in search of a better lifestyle. Sun, sea, sand, etc. Had I known the medical treatment would be so much better, I’d probably have jumped ship earlier.

That might sound extreme, but I’m far from alone. Tales of arriving in Australia and finally feeling listened to by medics are rife in my new (female) expat circles. My friend Sophia says the first time her PCOS concerns were taken seriously was when she moved to Melbourne from London. Alex says moving to Australia from London was like striking gold for her chronic pain. Another pal, Gemma, says NHS doctors dismissed her weight gain and mood swings for five years, insisting her symptoms were hormone-related. She was diagnosed with hypothyroidism (a thyroid condition that women are 10 times more likely to live with than men) within three months of arriving in Sydney, but she still ruminates about how many years she might have gone undiagnosed had she stayed in the UK.  

“I see this all the time: women moving here from the UK after years of heavy periods, pain after sex or chronic pelvic pain – they’ve been fobbed off, put on the pill and that’s it,” says Dr Michael Mrozinski, a Scottish-born NHS GP who moved from London to Queensland in 2016. “It’s really sad; I’ve got a lot of respect for GPs in the UK, but for conditions that require a bit more time and humanity, like endometriosis and adenomyosis, you can’t possibly deal with those in a rigid 10-minute appointment.”

So why the disparity? Fewer patients, happier and healthier medics, and a successful hybrid private-public funding model are among the factors that seem to have resulted in Australia consistently ranking among the best healthcare systems in the world (same-day GP appointments – what is this parallel universe?).

Stories of tripling their UK salaries, shorter work days and better training opportunities are common among the hundreds of NHS GPs lured to Australia each year, alongside a greater investment in resources. Australia has more hospital and intensive care beds than the UK, a greater focus on community health centres and five times more scanners per person than in the NHS, meaning patients get seen much more rapidly and diagnosed earlier.

The data speaks for itself: studies show Australia achieves significantly better outcomes than the UK when tackling the biggest killers like cancer, strokes and heart disease. It also has a better life expectancy than other English-speaking OECD nations. These are just some of the reasons that convinced health secretary Wes Streeting to make the 20,000-mile round trip to Australia last year.  

Streeting says he took several lessons from his fact-finding mission down under. Since the trip, he has announced plans to follow Australia’s lead, banning single-use vapes and diverting billions from hospitals to GPs. But one area where we’re not seeing much policy reform is in women’s health. Last month, just as Australian researchers announced a breakthrough new blood test for women and girls with endometriosis, the UK’s Labour party ditched previously announced targets to roll out women’s health hubs across the UK as part of its upcoming NHS plan.

Campaigners have since warned that women are being “sidelined and shunted back” by the healthcare system in this country. “Women are being hugely let down by the healthcare system,” says Dr Shirin Lakhani, a hormone and women’s health specialist.

Labour MP Sarah Owen said back in December that “it feels like you have to prove you’re not being a wimp”. She was speaking after a damning report by the Women and Equalities Committee found that women with conditions including heavy periods, endometriosis and adenomyosis were being dismissed when they asked for help.

Owen and fellow MPs warned that these dismissals were a result of “medical misogyny” that was “leaving women in pain and their conditions undiagnosed”. There’s still a stigma and lack of investment in gynaecological conditions; girls still aren’t taught what a ‘normal’ period should look like or how to advocate for themselves; pain is only acknowledged when it’s forced in front of multiple experts.  

Studies still regularly find that men are more likely to have their pain taken seriously than women, and that’s a global problem. According to the Hologic Global Women’s Health Index, an annual survey of nearly 79,000 women from 143 countries and territories, the UK has stagnated at a score of 60 out of 100, the same result as the previous year, representing a fall of seven places in the global rankings. It now ranks 37th globally, having been leapfrogged by countries including Poland, Singapore, Finland and Kazakhstan. So what exactly is the UK getting so wrong?

The answer, it seems, lies in the testimonials of NHS staff like Dr Mrozinski who’ve moved down under themselves. It wasn’t the doctors who were letting me down on the NHS – the UK has some of the best medics in the world, and half the time, it’s them who are treating me on the other side of the world. No, the problem – as we already know – is the system, which is overworking and underpaying staff.

“It’s called compassion fatigue – doctors lose empathy when they’re burnt out. I’ve been there,” says Dr Izzy Smith, a Sydney-based hormone specialist who works with many women who say they were called hysterical before finding the right help.  

Dr Mrozinski agrees with that diagnosis. Before he burnt out and left the NHS, he was getting through at least 35 10-minute appointments a day. It’s no wonder, he tells me, that my GP in the UK never made it past my headline symptoms. “In Australia, we have the autonomy to keep you in the room for half an hour and go into more detail about the impact symptoms are having on your day-to-day,” he explains. “In the UK, the referral system is so rigid that it’s difficult for GPs to use their own autonomy – and even the successful referrals take months to get a scan because the waiting lists are so big. Here, I could get you an ultrasound tomorrow – in the UK you’d be waiting months.”

After months of waiting, I did eventually get an ultrasound on the NHS; ironically, my NHS adenomyosis diagnosis came through once I’d left the UK. I’ve not even lived in Australia for six months, yet it seems to have been the single best thing I could’ve done for my overall health. The fatigue that left me feeling like I’d been hit by a truck most mornings? Turns out that was a symptom of anaemia (losing that amount of blood each month – go figure). The foot injury I was told was definitely not a stress fracture? Yup, a stress fracture. I had an x-ray within days of landing and saw a gynaecologist within weeks – in the UK, gynaecological waiting lists have grown faster than any other medical speciality in recent years.

My Aussie healthcare experience says just as much about the UK as it does Australia. I’d still put my life in the NHS’s hands in an emergency and, of course, medical misogyny is far from just a UK problem – but something is clearly wrong with Britain’s treatment of women’s health conditions if 80% of us believe that we’ve had our pain dismissed by a healthcare professional, as Neurofen’s 2024 Gender Pain Gap Index recently found.

Being listened to takes time, compassion and resources. And apparently, you’ve got a better chance of experiencing that if you jump on a plane for 24 hours and move to the other side of the world where doctors have a little more of all three. 

Images: Katie Strick