New scale helps ensure critical healthcare needs are met for women and girls

A team led by Dr. Julie Hennegan of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health has developed a scale to measure women's and girls' experiences of menstrual health and hygiene practices more accurately than ever before. The first of its kind, the Menstrual Practice Needs Scale (MPNS-36) focuses on women's and girls' perceptions about their menstrual experience and needs.

According to Dr. Hennegan, "in most measurements of menstrual health, the focus has been on the practices that women or girls undertake, such as the type of material or product they use to absorb their menses. While these questions may help us to understand what women and girls are doing, they do not capture whether these practices meet their needs."

This work was funded in part by The Case for Her, a philanthropic investment portfolio addressing key women's health issues of menstruation and female sexual health. Commenting on the development, Wendy Anderson, Co-founder of The Case for Her said, "when organizations evaluate menstrual health practices, their methods are designed around what they think is important, but menstrual health is about body ownership and the lived experience. To find solutions that make a real difference, we knew we had to go directly to the women and girls."

MPNS-36 was born out of a need to consider a more holistic view of the menstrual experience rather than an overemphasis on products and hygiene, such as the use of menstrual pads, as the sole solution to difficulties. Items in MPNS-36 were informed by a systematic review of 76 studies of the experience of menstruation in low and middle-income countries, representing by over 6,000 women and girls.

In partnership with Irise International and Irise Institute East Africa, the scale was tested in a survey of 538 menstruating schoolgirls in Uganda, which helped to narrow down the items and test the scale's performance.

Calum Smith, Director of Operations at Irise International, said, "the MNPS is a real game-changer. It's a powerful tool that will allow researchers and practitioners to track improvements in menstrual experiences and to link these to other strategic impact frameworks, allowing us to measure our impact in ways that place girls' experiences at the center as well as providing comparisons to other interventions."

Future work will test the performance of the scale in other populations, contexts, and languages.