What is the project’s purpose?

There is growing public interest and research investigating the impact of the menopause and people’s experiences of health care provision for menopause. Most research thus far has mainly sampled women from a White background, and there is limited knowledge around how women from ethnic minority backgrounds may be impacted. Cultural differences have been shown to play a role in the way menopausal symptoms are experienced and managed, and therefore this further needs to be explored. We hope to particularly investigate the experiences of menopause in South Asian women in the UK, including your experiences with healthcare professionals when accessing support for this. We hope to investigate this through a survey to capture a wide range of experiences from women across the UK.

Who can take part?
We are recruiting South Asian women and people with ovaries based in the UK, aged 40 to 60 years old, and who are currently in the peri-menopause or at the stage of early post-menopause according to the below criteria:
1) Has the length of your total menstrual cycle reduced by approximately 7 days? (Stage -2 - Perimenopause)
2) Have you skipped 2 or more menstrual cycles, with at least 1 interval being 60 days or more? (Stage -1- Perimenopause)
3) Was your final menstrual cycle 12 months ago or more? (Stage +1 – Early post-menopause)

We are currently recruiting through various social media platforms, community organisations and existing menopause networks (Menopause Café (https://www.menopausecafe.net/) and Menopause Matters (https://www.menopausematters.co.uk/)

What are the benefits of taking part?

Completing this survey will help fill gaps in research on South Asian women’s experiences of menopause and access to support. The findings will contribute to improving healthcare provision for South Asian women in the UK You will also have the opportunity to attend an event hosted by the Menopause Mind Lab where we will provide presentations on our current research and an opportunity for a Question-and-Answer session with the research team.

What will happen to me if I take part?
After you give your consent to take part, you will be given access to some screening questions and then the online survey. We will ask questions related to:

Information about you: for example, your age, sexual orientation, gender identity, ethnicity, relationship status, employment status, education.

Your health information: including questions around your physical health, whether you have used or are using Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT), as well as your mood. Your menopause status, your experience of the menopause and any support you have been offered/ accessed for your symptoms.

You do not have to answer any questions you do not wish to, and you will be able to move past any questions you do not wish to answer. The survey should take no longer than 20 minutes to complete. 

We will not ask you to provide your name, therefore this will not appear in any datasets and publications related to this study. However, if you would like to attend the event hosted by Menopause Mind Lab, you may provide your contact details which will be stored on a password-protected spreadsheet on a secure UCL drive and separately from survey responses and study data. The researcher will then get in touch at a later date with further information about the event. Your contact details will be deleted the week after the online event has taken place. This is optional; It is your choice whether you would like to be given access to the event. You do not have to enter your contact details should you not wish to attend.

What if something goes wrong?
To raise a complaint, you can contact the Principal Investigator (Aimee Spector, a.spector@ucl.ac.uk) in the first instance. If you feel that your complaint has not been handled to your satisfaction, you can also contact the Chair of the UCL Research Ethics Committee (ethics@ucl.ac.uk)

For further information on how to get involved, please click on the following link https://www.ucl.ac.uk/brain-sciences/pals/research/clinical-educational-and-health-psychology/research-groups/menopause-mind-lab/get-involved.