Last week we joined Endometriosis UK and Menstrual Cycle Support at their event to mark Endometriosis Action Month and to launch their digital menstrual health and education platform for teenagers.

In 2022 Meaningful Measures Ltd partnered with Menstrual Cycle Support, the world's first non-clinical menstrual health service to be available on referral through the GP surgery on social prescription. Menstrual Cycle Support have used MYCaW® to show the real-world impact of menstrual health concerns and explore how their ground-breaking free online menstrual literacy course can support women.

As part of our partnership, we completed an analysis of MYCaW© data from the Menstrual Cycle Support Course for adults in 2023. The Menstrual Cycle Course is available online for free at launch and for the duration of data collection, and available from more than 500 GP surgeries in the UK and is delivered in six 10-minute bitesize modules, can be taken at any time through a menstrual cycle and over several cycles.

Of the 636 people who took the Menstrual Cycle Support course, data entry for 121 people was received by Meaningful Measures Ltd to analyse. 

Relationship with and confidence to talk about the menstrual cycle improve

Respondents were asked to rate their relationship with their menstrual cycle on a scale of 0 to 6, where 0 was the worst score and 6 was the best score.As shown in Table 1, there was a clear improvement by the end of the course showing that for or this group of people, it can therefore be concluded that the Menstrual Cycle Support course is meeting the aim of improving menstrual education and allowing people to understand their menstrual cycle and have confidence to talk about it. 

Table 1. Analysis of score changes when people were asked to rate their relationship with their menstrual cycle, and their confidence talking about the menstrual cycle (0 is worst, 6 is best).

Framework of Concerns from people completing the Menstrual Cycle Support course

To support the systematic analysis of MYCaW© concerns, a framework of themes and categories was developed using all of the concerns that people identified in their baseline questionnaire. When combining Concern 1 and Concern 2, a total of 198 concerns were reported by people as they started the Menstrual Cycle Support course.

Five key themes emerged when analysing the concerns data. Where possible each theme was then split into further discrete categories and an inclusion definition was written for each category. Table 2 details the full framework. 

Table 2. Framework of concerns from people completing the Menstrual Cycle Support course for adults (n=198 concerns)

The theme about menstrual cycle concerns was split into a further 7 categories shown in table 2. Further description and examples of concerns in each of the categories is provided in the full report below.

MYCaW© Score changes

All evaluations that had baseline scores and matching follow-up scores were deemed to have 'paired' data and were used in the analysis of MYCaW© concerns and wellbeing score changes. Table 3 outlines the score changes, statistical significance levels and the relevance of these score changes. MYCaW© concerns showed an average reduction in the severity once the participants had completed the Menstrual Cycle Support course. The average wellbeing scores also improved after completion of the course.

Table 3. Summary of the MYCaW© score changes. A negative score change denotes and improvement for the person.

Participants were also asked what was important about the support from the Menstrual Cycle Support course. There were 4 themes that emerged from the feedback of the respondents – Knowledge about the menstrual cycle; Course in general; Acceptance of how the course affects 'me'; Charting. Some example are:

"Learning to honour the menstrual cycle instead of fighting against (also learning that the cycle is a whole 28 days or more not just my period!)."

"Giving myself peace and permission to rest."

"The fact that our cycle has 4 phases was a revelation for me and something I had never considered before. I understand now that I should start tracking my cycles to try and understand the patterns that might emerge."

"Menstrual Cycle Support offers a new intervention for primary care via social prescribing, so it is extremely important we use the most robust methods of measuring impact such as MyCaw©, from a reputable and objective organisation, like Meaningful Measures Ltd." – Kate Shepherd Cohen, Founder & CEO of Menstrual Cycle Support.

Full details of the analysis, along with recommendations are available in the report.