International Women’s Day gave us the perfect opportunity to put the spotlight on a very common, but rarely spoken about women’s health issue, fibroids.

We felt it was important to add the fibroids perspective to all the messages that were put forward for International Women’s Day because we know from the work we’ve conducted that women with fibroids feel isolated, don’t feel like their voices are being heard and don’t feel like enough is being done to address their challenges.

We Pressed for Progressed

So, we teamed up with Noire Wellness to develop a campaign that highlighted five key areas that we believe need attention if we are to improve the experience of women living with fibroids.

The theme for International Women’s Day was ‘Press for Progress’ and we fit out campaign into this theme by calling for everyone to press for progress with fibroids.  We explained that for progress to be made we need:

• Breakthrough research into fibroids and ethnicity
• Patient insight on the impact of diet and exercise on fibroids
• A commitment to professional excellence when caring for women with a family history of fibroids and symptoms associated with fibroids
• Global and local support networks to ensure that women with fibroids never feel isolated
• Greater awareness of fibroids, its symptoms and impact on women’s lives, particularly the psycho-social impact

We launched our campaign in the week leading up to International Women’s Day and were so happy with the response on social media.  The Twitter community in particular really got involved sharing, retweeting, making use of our resources and commenting on our key messages.

Today is #IWD2018 and we’re joining @noirewellness and @lakehealthwell to call for action to #PressForProgress towards an improvement in the experience of all women affected by #fibroids. pic.twitter.com/d7vc4aP4H1

— Brands of Colour (@BrandsofColour) March 8, 2018

Looking at the data, our messages had a global reach with people from the US, UK, the Caribbean, India, Nigeria and Kenya visiting our campaign page and engaging with our material. It was also great to see the range of organisations who showed support or commented on the need for this campaign.

Next Steps

Now that the campaign is over, we’re not resting, we’re going to continue to press for progress and explore how we can address some of the areas that we focused on. Both ourselves and Noire Wellness have been playing our part individually and we’re committed to joining forces as we move forward.

In terms of the individual projects we have been working on, Noire Wellness launched their annual Fibroids Wellness Hub in November 2017 and if you listen to episode 5 of our podcast you can hear founder & CEO of Noire Wellness, Candice Bryan, mention an exciting new series that they’ll be launching in June 2018. In addition to this, Candice has delivered presentations on Fibroids and Exercise at a variety of wellness events and they have a fibroids newsletter; you can sign up here  to be added to their mailing list.

Here at Lake Health and Wellbeing our projects have included:

• Forming a Fibroids Ask the Expert Panel
• Publishing a fibroids booklet
• Hosting our first conference for women affected by fibroids
• Delivering presentations to churches and community groups
• Hosting a regular fibroids Twitter chat
• Writing a fibroids blog and news series
• Working on a fibroids fact sheet series
• Contributing to the APPG’s fibroids inquiry

In terms of joint projects, we are exploring organising a fibroids wellness retreat in the Caribbean, looking at our campaign areas to determine a specific approach for addressing these (more information about this soon) and are interested in bringing together fibroids organisations from across the globe to explore common issues that women are battling.

Thank you

A big thank you to everyone who got involved in our campaign, we really appreciate all your support and please do keep in touch so we can keep you informed. You can sign up to our newsletter or follow us on social media for updates.