About Us

HysterSisters is a woman-owned, “social advocacy” health education company dedicated to medical and emotional issues surrounding the hysterectomy experience and gynecologic-related conditions and illnesses, supporting women from diagnosis, to treatment, to recovery. Since 1998, HysterSisters has provided personalized support, dispersed educational materials, and conducted research–all at no cost to the women who visit the website.

HysterSisters.com, with over 350,000 members, records more than 25,000 members and visitors each day to find articles, videos and personal support through the large online community. Specialized surgery date content is provided to members called “Hysterectomy Checkpoints”.

The Hysterectomy Association is a social enterprise set up by Linda Parkinson-Hardman in 1997, to provide impartial, timely and appropriate information to women who were facing a hysterectomy. The biggest concern that the majority of women have is that they haven’t been given enough information to help them make an informed decision and unfortunately this position doesn’t seem to be changing much.

Over the years, The Hysterectomy Association has changed beyond all expectation and it is now achieving what it hoped to in the early days, simply because use of the Internet has grown so incredibly over the last few years. We are a member of the NCVO (National Council for Voluntary Organisations) and are bound by their codes of conduct.

Pass The Pearls is a non-profit organization dedicated to changing the world of women’s healthcare, spreading the word about state of the art surgical care for women and improving access to minimally invasive surgery. Pass the Pearls is devoted to passing on health information to women so that they can be proactive about their treatment options. With education, women will be empowered to seek out those surgeons who can provide minimally invasive surgery.

Kathy Kelley is the founder and CEO of HysterSisters. As a patient educator, Kathy is often invited to speak to surgeons and patients about the needs of the hysterectomy patient. She has also appeared before the FDA advisory council as an advocate for the hysterectomy and surgical menopause patient. She has written and compiled What 350,000 Women Know About Hysterectomy, Our Hysterectomy Stories, and Mister HysterSisters Guide. As part of her mission to educate women about gynecologic illnesses and surgeries, she has partnered with physicians across the country to develop HysterSisters.com into the leading website for hysterectomy support and information. You can visit it at www.HysterSisters.com.

In 1994 Linda Parkinson-Hardman had a hysterectomy. She was supposed to be reasonably intelligent, but two years later realised how little she’d really understood about her body and the changes surgery would cause. A Master’s degree research project provided the perfect opportunity to find out more about the information that women really needed and the rest, as they say, is history. The project set out to demonstrate how a new invention called ‘the web’ could be used to disseminate information to women; that ‘project’ evolved into The Hysterectomy Association and has been providing information and support to millions of women in the UK and beyond since 1997. You can visit it at Hysterectomy-association.org.uk and find out more about Linda on LinkedIn.

Dr. Lori Warren, founder of Pass the Pearls, is a gynecologist and a partner with Women First of Louisville. As a Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgeon, Dr. Warren has worked to train other surgeons in less invasive surgical procedures. She is an Assistant Clinical Professor at the University of Louisville, Dept. of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Dr. Warren is the Co-director for the AAGL Minimally Invasive Gynecologic Surgery Fellowship with the University of Louisville. She is passionately devoted to reducing the large number of unnecessary abdominal “open” hysterectomies performed in the United States. Dr. Warren’s goal is to inform women about their surgical options and to help women gain access to the best and least invasive procedures. Visit the website at Passthepearls.org.