⌛Five years in the making! Sustained pressure from Sling The Mesh helped drive the development of a new patient questionnaire with a Leeds University research team to record outcomes before and after pelvic floor surgery – including Bulkamid. We were in Leeds this week for one of the final workshops.

This matters because there has never been a patient‑reported outcome measure (PROM) capturing prolapse and bladder leak surgery outcomes from the patient perspective. For decades, long‑term harm went unrecorded and women’s voices were ignored.

Yet we are still concerned about whether the metric will be able to accurately capture the outcomes women experience. After so much work from researchers and patients- the metric needs to do what it was intended to do

While vaginal prolapse mesh was banned in 2017 and bladder mesh slings suspended in 2018, abdominal mesh for prolapse is still widely used across the NHS. Our hope is still that this questionnaire helps expose the reality of long‑term complications and closes a major evidence gap- but as it stands, we believe further work is required to improve the metric.

The funding for this PROM happened because of Sling the Mesh, especially Ruth MacLeod. And many women have now given their time to meetings and workshops to make sure harms that matter to women were included. Find out more about the APPRAISE PROM here.