All downloadable guides, leaflets and resources from the VPS, including our Vulval Pain leaflet and Smears without Tears, our smear guide, are in this section. They are all available both as webpages and downloadable PDFs, or where possible, audio MP3 files.

Alternatively, the Vulval Pain leaflet and the smear guide are both available as printed colour leaflets. If you would like us to post you copies of either or both of these leaflets, please email us at info@vulvalpainsociety.org, stating which leaflet(s) you would like and how many.

Smears without Tears: Patient self-help guide for speculum examinations

This is a guide on how to get the best out of your smear test (also known as a pap test). You might want to print it out and take it with you to your next test.

The PDF of the guide prints out as a double-sided leaflet (rather like our Vulval Pain leaflet), as we think that leaflets are smaller and easier to carry around. When printing out the leaflet, you may find that it prints best if you scale it to fit A4 paper rather than printing at 100%, but the result will also depend on your make of printer, so it’s worth experimenting.

Vulval pain information leaflet

This is the Vulval Pain Society’s leaflet on vulval pain, including vulvodynia, vestibulodynia and other vulval pain conditions. The PDF of the leaflet is meant to be printed on both sides of the same A4 sheet and then folded into three sections. We usually have these printed out by our printing company and then we distribute the leaflets at workshops, talks, conferences and events, as well as making them available to local support groups and various hospital clinics. We hope they are easily printable; please do send us feedback if you have any problems.

Alternatively, you can listen to the leaflet as an MP3 podcast:

Vulvodynia pre-clinic questionnaire

We have formulated a pre-clinic questionnaire that can be filled in and given to your doctor prior to the clinic visit.

The advantages of this are:

1) Writing down information can focus your thoughts on your symptoms.

2) It can jog your memory – it is not uncommon to forget what to tell the doctor in the clinic due to anxiety and stress!

3) Sometimes the consultations are too short for you to tell your doctor the whole story.  Your doctor will find it very helpful to have a list of treatments that you have used.

We are grateful to the British Society for the Study of Vulval Disease (BSSVD) for their endorsement of this questionnaire.

Are we speaking the same language? Patient and doctor attitudes to pain

In this article, VPS founder David Nunns reflects on and discusses patient and doctor attitudes to pain, and gives some tips on how to get the most from your consultation.

A checklist in preparation for your vulval pain hospital consultation

This checklist has been developed for people with vulval pain to use prior to visiting a pain clinic.

Bladder pain syndrome (BPS)

This article by Winston de Mello and Julie Cairnduff gives information on painful bladder syndrome and interstitial cystitis. Reproduced here by kind permission of UK charity Bladder Health UK.