About Sling The Mesh

Founded in 2015 by former journalist and photographer Kath Sansom after her own experience with a TVT mesh sling, Sling The Mesh offers support and advice to people suffering complications from surgical mesh implants used in prolapse, incontinence, hernia repair, and certain breast surgeries, including cancer reconstruction.

The Sling The Mesh Facebook support group helps people around the globe. Most are injured by mesh made from polypropylene plastic, although some members are suffering from biological mesh grafts.

Sling The Mesh was a key powerful advocate in the Cumberlege First Do No Harm report and submitted a 240-page document of evidence of the regulatory failings, gaslighting of patients, lack of data, and urgent reform to ensure the pelvic mesh scandal never happens again.

Kath (pictured) represented the mesh community on the former All-Party Parliamentary Group for Surgical Mesh and now the APPG for First Do No Harm.

Our campaign work played an important role in halting the use of vaginal mesh slings, which used to be in common surgical practice for incontinence before being suspended across the UK in 2018 on the recommendation of Baroness Cumberlege as part of the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety Review.

We are stakeholders for the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and submit evidence to mesh guidelines. Vaginal prolapse mesh was effectively suspended by NICE in December 2017, a decision we fed into. Abdominally inserted prolapse mesh is still used, but under high vigilance restriction.

Our advocacy led to the creation of the Medical Devices Outcomes Registry MDOR to track medical devices implanted in the NHS – for the implant’s lifetime and also a registry called APPRAISE to monitor patient recorded outcomes of prolapse and incontinence surgeries and of mesh complications.