By Kath Sansom and Ruth MacLeod

Patient Safety and Women’s Health Minister Baroness Gillian Merron has pledged to work at pace on financial redress after admitting she is “shocked at the degree to which women’s voices have been ignored” in the mesh scandal.

The pledge came during a round table meeting where mesh campaigners spoke of the physical, mental, emotional and financial impact caused by pelvic mesh complications – many of which are life-changing and irreversible.

Baroness Merron said that both as a woman and as a government minister she has found the stories of suffering” intolerable.”

Among her pledges was to look at both the original Independent Medicines and Medical Device Safety Review (IMMDS) led by Baroness Julia Cumberlege, and the Hughes Report in tandem when it came to rectopexy mesh – as it is becoming clear there are discrepancies between the two.

Ahead of the meeting, Sling The Mesh sent a dossier of evidence to the team supporting Baroness Merron, outlining that in the original IMMDS Review we successfully lobbied for all rectopexy-harmed women to be fully included. Yet in the subsequent Hughes Report it appears as if some of those could be excluded.

We hope those discrepancies will now be resolved.

Financial Redress – our calls to action

• The IMMDS Review involved the four nations of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales, as many aspects of medical regulations such as the MHRA, GMC and Royal Colleges cover all four countries. Women from all countries in the UK travelled to give evidence to the review team. We impressed the importance of working with the devolved nations for financial redress for all harmed women across the UK.
• Mesh injuries impact the whole family. Some women cannot care for children or grandchildren leaving a burden of both guilt and finances in finding alternative care provision.
• Ex Pats and British Forces personnel must be included in the financial redress scheme.
• An initial first payment sum has been mooted of around £20,000 in the Hughes Report. We called for that figure to be raised to £40,000.
• Financial redress must be delivered in a timely manner. Women must not be made to wait as the victims of the blood scandal have.
• Financial redress must be carefully screened for patient fraud.
• PIP is failing our mesh community. Some of our most harmed members are turned down despite appeals. Most PIP assessors have not heard of the Mesh Condition Insight report which Sling The Mesh helped work on with the Department of Work and Pensions.
• We delivered powerful insights on the suffering using data from our Sling The Mesh surveys.

First Do No Harm 9 Key recommendations – our calls to action

• The Baroness Cumberlege First Do No Harm report made 9 key recommendations which we discussed during the round table.
• Recommendation 5 called for specialist Mesh Centres – but these are failing women with long waiting lists, a postcode lottery on care and some centre leads who are still denying mesh complications for some women. Partial removals and two-stage removals are not acceptable.
• Recommendation 6 called for an overhaul of the MHRA’s adverse event reporting. We have, for some years, called for adverse event reporting by doctors to be made mandatory as it is currently a flawed voluntary system which does not capture all the side effects and complications of health treatments.
• Recommendation 8b called for transparency of payments from industry to the health sector. We called for a reply to our letter to Baroness Merron from September urging for a Sunshine Act for the UK. The letter was co signed by politicians, researchers and other patient safety organisations.

Raise The Limit

Also attending was #raisethelimit campaign to talk about how to strengthen the chances of future harmed patients taking out product liability cases against the makers of medical devices going forward. This would require a law change to raise the current time frame from 10 years to at least 20 years to tie in with the rest of Europe.