A Nine-Year Wait for an Endometriosis Diagnosis Could Soon Take a Single Afternoon
Simran Chavda was 13 when the pelvic pain started. For two years, her mother, a GP herself, took her back to doctors and emergency rooms that could not explain it. They were told it was probably irritable bowel syndrome. By the time 15-year-old Simran finally had a name for what was wrong, they had been to Accident & Emergency three or four times, once spending more than ten hours there, with no one taking ownership of the case.
That kind of delay is common. Endometriosis, a condition where tissue similar to the womb lining grows elsewhere in the body, affects roughly one in ten women of reproductive age in the UK. The average wait for a diagnosis is nine years and four months, stretching to eleven years for patients from ethnically diverse communities. Until now, the only way to confirm it for certain was a laparoscopy: a surgical procedure under general anesthesia that threads a small camera into the pelvis through a cut in the abdomen.
On July 7, 2026, the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence, the body that decides what the NHS funds, recommended two non-invasive tests that skip that step. NICE says Endotest checks a saliva sample for microRNA markers linked to the condition, while EndoSure uses sensor pads on the abdomen to measure electrical activity in the gut over a 45-minute test, after the patient fasts and drinks water. Both are meant to support a clinical exam rather than replace it, and can now be funded through core NHS money in primary care while more evidence is gathered over the next three years.
For Simran’s mother, the test result gave her something concrete to bring back to their own doctor: real evidence, harder to doubt or delay than a description of pain. Ami Robertson, a 23-year-old Pilates instructor from Glasgow who spent seven years being told her symptoms were irritable bowel syndrome, had a similar experience after her own non-invasive test. “For the first time,” she said, “I was believed.”
NICE’s recommendation is draft guidance, not a finished policy. The organization is taking public comments through July 27 and meeting again on August 12 before anything is final, and the tests are explicitly not stand-alone diagnostic tools. What has changed already is that GPs in primary care now have a funded, same-day option to point to instead of a multi-year wait for a specialist and a surgical referral.
Dr. Gail Busby, a gynecologist at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust, has treated patients who lost years of school and ordinary life to unexplained pain. Earlier answers, she says, change more than one patient’s path: every case resolved without a surgical referral frees up a slot for someone else still waiting.
