Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 08 September 2020
I thank Baroness Cumberlege for her excellent report. It stands in stark contrast to the discredited sham of a review that was conducted in Scotland a few years back.
It has taken eight years for a debate on mesh to happen in Government parliamentary time, despite this being one of the biggest medical scandals in the history of Scotland’s NHS. Every step of the way, ministers and the medical establishment have had to be dragged, kicking and screaming, to take action to support mesh-injured women. The situation is exactly the same for women who were victims of sodium valproate and Primodos.
Mesh-injured women have faced systematic cover-up, denial, manipulation of medical records and vested interests protecting themselves and forgetting that the priority should always be patient care. Warm words and sympathy cut no ice with those who have lost their jobs, homes or life savings, or those who have lost their organs, relationships or ability to walk. Those words cut no ice with women who now use wheelchairs and walking aids, who have double incontinence and live lives of chronic debilitating pain, or whose children’s health, growth or development have been terribly affected.
They do not need another clinician or minister empathising with their plight; the mesh women already feel used by a First Minister who, having ignored them for eight years, suddenly became desperate to meet them. I wonder whether the fact that that was in the middle of a general election might have had something to do with it. [Interruption.] Those were their words, not mine.
Those women demand from the medical establishment action that puts them first rather than action that puts first the vested interests of the surgeons who implanted them or the manufacturers whose products maimed them. They need a care pathway that includes the right for them to have this poison removed from their bodies safely, if that is what they want. However, that removal must be undertaken only by clinicians who know what they are doing. Would any member here trust a doctor whose recommendations and actions had wrecked their life to be the person to remove a product that is designed not to be removed from the body?
Like the cabinet secretary, I have seen medical notes that were signed by senior clinicians stating that a full or complete mesh removal had taken place only for the same patient to have up to another 20cm of mesh removed after they had to fund themselves to go to the US to get treatment from Dr Veronikis. What is the cabinet secretary’s and the GMC’s view of those shocking cases? Are they medical errors or are patients being misled?