Hospitals that score poorly on feedback from female patients could soon see their budget cut under a plan unveiled in April by Wes Streeting, the UK’s health secretary. Branded “patient power payments”, the scheme would tie a slice of hospital income to women’s experiences of care, a measure designed to end what Streeting himself has called an “appalling culture of medical misogyny” in England’s National Health Service.

The instinct behind the policy is understandable. Women’s anger is real, well founded and widely overdue for a serious answer.

The current backlog experienced by women is the clearest summary of the problem. Nearly a quarter of a million women are on waiting lists for gynaecological care in England. This number has roughly doubled since 2018 and grown faster than any other clinical speciality’s waiting list.

In a survey of more than 100,000 women, half said their pain had been disregarded and overlooked. In the UK today, obtaining a diagnosis of endometriosis (a painful condition affecting roughly one in ten women) now takes an average of nearly nine years and roughly ten visits to a GP.

This is a cultural sickness. Whether the right response is to dock money from overburdened hospitals is a different question.

Pay-for-performance schemes for hospitals have a long and somewhat........

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