Ministers must act urgently to ensure women harmed by pelvic mesh receive financial redress and suitable care.

Sling The Mesh gave evidence to the Health Select Committee in December 2022 and urged for timely action for women who have irreversibly lost their physical and financial health.

We innocently trusted the mesh surgery we signed up to was gold standard – it is only right we receive financial redress for our losses and have excellent care within the NHS to deal with our mesh complications.

Sling The Mesh is calling for the 10 mesh complication centres to provide well-trained surgeons and empathetic care. Wait times can be up to four years, appointments can be cancelled at the last minute, women at some centres are being coerced out of removal and many centres have poor aftercare.

Some of the mesh centres are being run by the same pro-mesh surgeons who said mesh isn’t a problem – yet women are now supposed to trust those consultants to remove their permanent implant and provide sympathetic support.

There is no joined up logging of mesh removal outcomes, making it impossible for patients to tell which centres are getting the best results.

Serious concerns

We have serious concerns about the Government’s failure to collect data on the number of women who experienced complications following surgical mesh surgery.

Whenever a media outlet covers the mesh story, it asks how many women had mesh and how many are suffering complications. The sad answer is we have no idea because no one bothered keeping track.

We also have concerns about litigation through the courts – the only route we have so far for financial compensation – as some cases fail at the final stage; some are out of the three-year time frame, while crucially, many women cannot face a stressful court case.

Expert witnesses cherry pick evidence and often blame mesh pain on a woman’s previous mental health or physical health issues, such as depression or bad backs. Ministers rejected an alternative approach recommended by the independent IMMDS review more than two years ago, for a stand-alone redress agency.

A glimmer of hope came for women in the Health Select meeting when health minister Maria Caulfield said she would be willing to consider a redress agency, as well as redress schemes.

‘Heartbreaking accounts’

Steve Brine MP, who chairs the Health and Social Care Committee, said: “We heard heartbreaking accounts of how the health system has failed to provide proper guidance, care and support to women and their families despite them having suffered avoidable harm as a result of medical interventions.

“Crucially, those affected have been unable to get rightful redress because to win a legal claim for compensation they had to prove blame on the part of the healthcare provider. We have been encouraged to hear health minister Maria Caulfield say she is now willing to look at the idea of a redress agency and urge swift progress to rectify years or even decades of harm.”

In a follow-up letter to the committee, Sling The Mesh urged for:

• Government to enact legislation to set up register of industry payments to clinicians through a UK equivalent to the US Sunshine Payment Act.
• Carry out a meaningful 2010 audit of mesh-injured women by recalling them, as opposed to using the Hospitals Episodes Statistics. This data omits private patients, and the thousands of women who have only been to their doctor for mesh pain and not their local hospital.
• Ensure PIP assessors know about mesh.
• Mandatory reporting of adverse events to the Yellow Card by doctors. At the moment it is only voluntary for them to report.

The Health and Social Care Committee evidence session followed up the Independent Medicines and Medical Devices Safety review’s report, First Do No Harm, published in July 2020. The review examined the response of England’s healthcare systems to reports of harmful side effects from pelvic mesh, sodium valproate and hormone pregnancy test Primodos.