Pulse ·
Australia's first perimenopause campaign: recognition, finally — now what?
The Australian Government launched its first national perimenopause campaign — "Could This Be Perimenopause?" — running until December 2026. It targets women 35–55 and publicly names symptoms (sleep disruption, brain fog, sweats, anxiety, fatigue) routinely dismissed in consulting rooms.
Since 1 July 2025, Medicare covers a menopause health assessment (item 699) — over 105,000 women have used it. The campaign aims to connect millions more to that name and that assessment.
Recognition is a start, not a solution. Access inequality in rural and remote settings remains. But this is the first time the federal government has named the experience at national scale.
There’s something worth pausing on before the analysis.
The Australian Government has just launched its first-ever national perimenopause and menopause awareness campaign. Not a women’s health document. Not a guideline update. A national advertising campaign — television, cinema, digital, social, out-of-home — running until December 2026, with the stated goal of helping Australian women aged 35 to 55 recognise what they are experiencing.
The campaign is called “Could This Be Perimenopause?”. It was built by the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing and Ogilvy, and it centres on a device that is frankly well-chosen: the internal voice of a woman going through perimenopause symptoms — sleep that won’t stay, a brain that won’t hold a thought, sweat that arrives with no warning, anxiety that has no obvious cause, exhaustion that doesn’t respond to rest. The campaign names these as perimenopause symptoms. On national television.
If you have been told your bloods are normal and your symptoms are vague, and someone on the television just named your exact experience — that is a different kind of news than a clinical guideline update.
The both-and
The campaign is a genuine step. It is also a beginning, not a solution. Hold both.
What the campaign gets right. Naming matters. Many women in perimenopause have spent years in consulting rooms where symptoms were attributed to anxiety, thyroid dysfunction, depression, stress, or simply — nothing diagnosable. The absence of a shared language has not been a minor inconvenience. It has shaped whether women seek care, whether GPs take the presentation seriously, and whether the clinical pathway gets activated at all. A national campaign that says — publicly, to the 45-year-old sitting up at 11pm wondering what is wrong with her — “this has a name, and you are not imagining it” is not a trivial intervention.
The structural supports are also real. Since 1 July 2025, Medicare has covered a dedicated menopause health assessment under item 699. More than 105,000 Australian women have already used it. The women’s health PBS package has added the first new menopausal hormone therapy listings in over 20 years — Estrogel, Estrogel Pro, Prometrium — bringing the cost to $25 general rate or $7.70 concession. The campaign is designed to be a bridge from the woman who doesn’t yet know she has options to the consultation where those options become available.
What the campaign cannot do. It cannot replace clinical assessment. Perimenopause is a clinical diagnosis made across a conversation — one that includes menstrual history, symptom timing, cardiovascular risk, bone density trajectory, thyroid status, and a lot of context that doesn’t fit in a TV spot. The campaign correctly links to the government website and encourages a GP consultation. But the GP consultation requires a GP, which requires access, which is where the structural gap lives.
Rural and remote Australian women — who already have lower rates of Medicare-funded specialist care — will see the same campaign. The awareness it creates will encounter the same geographic and financial barriers downstream. The women least likely to have already been accessing menopause care are the women for whom the campaign-to-consult pathway has the most friction. That doesn’t make the campaign wrong. It makes the access work urgent, and it makes the campaign a floor, not a ceiling.
There is also the question of knowledge at the GP level. Prescribing menopausal hormone therapy well — understanding the evidence base since the WHI reassessment, navigating the risk profile for a specific woman, selecting transdermal versus oral, managing the progesterone question — requires a level of clinical depth that has not uniformly reached every general practice in Australia. The campaign creates demand. Demand requires supply. Supply requires that GPs feel confident in the consultation.
2 cents
If you are a woman aged 35–55 and you have been experiencing disrupted sleep, brain fog, hot flushes, anxiety with no obvious cause, or exhaustion that isn’t responding to the usual things — this week is a reasonable time to book a GP appointment and name those symptoms.
Ask specifically about the Medicare menopause health assessment (item 699). It exists, it is subsidised, and it is the clinical entry point to this conversation. Bring a symptom list if it helps. The consultation is where the specifics get worked out — whether MHT is appropriate for you, what the contraindications are, whether something else is contributing, and what monitoring looks like.
This is general information. Perimenopause symptoms overlap with thyroid dysfunction, iron deficiency, sleep disorders, and anxiety — and the individual conversation with your GP is how the specifics become clear. Nothing here substitutes for that.
Verdict
Verdict: yes — worth knowing about.
Australia’s first national perimenopause campaign is a meaningful moment: public naming of a life stage that has been routinely dismissed, linked to real policy and PBS supports that now exist. The campaign alone doesn’t resolve access inequality, doesn’t guarantee clinical competence at the GP level, and doesn’t do the individual clinical work. But it creates conditions for a conversation that millions of Australian women have not yet had. That’s enough to call it a yes.