Hansard

I, too, recognise the work of Jackson Carlaw, Neil Findlay and Alex Neil on this issue. It has spanned my entire career in Parliament and has been awe inspiring.

I welcome the opportunity to debate the findings of the Cumberlege review. The stories told by patients are of debilitating pain that has life-changing consequences. What links all the cases is the level of acute suffering that could have been avoided, and that truly is a public health disaster.

Common to all three of the medical interventions that are examined in the review is that the patients were nearly always women, and in many cases the interventions were linked to their pregnancies. The fact that their chronic symptoms were dismissed for so long as so-called women’s problems is scandalous and a horrific example of gender inequality. When we look back at how many lives have been wrecked by those interventions in the past few decades, it is a matter of national shame. Nothing can undo the damage other than an apology, compensation, corrective surgery and psychological support.

Thousands of women who took the drug Primodos had children who were born with sometimes painful disabilities, and those children are now adults. There is no doubt in my mind that the redress needs to be significant for all the cases in the review. That compensation should come from the UK Government, as well as the regulatory bodies that failed those women and the German drug company Bayer, which needs to accept some responsibility. It knew in the 1960s that the drug was harmful but carried on marketing and making a profit from it. It is outrageous that Bayer continues to deny the link between the drug and the disabilities.

My former colleague at Westminster Norman Lamb called the use of sodium valproate during pregnancy in the 1970s an “extraordinary scandal”. An estimated 20,000 children, also now adults, have been left with disabilities as a result. Even more painful to mothers is that they would certainly never have taken the drug, which was used to treat mild seizures, had they been fully informed of the potential side effects for their babies.

However, it is the issue of mesh that has united Parliament this afternoon, and I will focus the remainder of my remarks on that. I welcome the national vaginal mesh removal service that was launched last month, in particular the much-needed psychological support alongside the £1.3 million fund. I ask the cabinet secretary to say in her closing remarks whether patients will be able to choose their own surgeon for corrective surgery. It is an important point, also made by Neil Findlay, that many women do not have confidence that the surgeon who originally caused their injury should be part of the solution. I think that we need to recognise that fear and anxiety.

I also want to be sure that, if they need to travel outside this country, the women will have the costs of so doing reimbursed to them by NHS Scotland. I raise the issue of international intervention, because, as we have heard, the US-based obstetrician Dr Veronikis is a world leader in mesh removal surgery. It is hugely regrettable that he has withdrawn his offer to come to Scotland, following difficulties and delays in arranging the visit. I recognise, from what the cabinet secretary has said, that that offer to him is still open, and I hope very much that he will come here and train surgeons to carry out corrective surgery, as that is fundamental in doing right by these patients.

Alison Johnstone mentioned in very eloquent terms the visit, which she and I attended and which was organised by Neil Findlay, of the mesh survivors group in a ground-floor room of the Scottish Parliament. That visit will stay with me for the remainder of my parliamentary career and probably the rest of my life. Many of those women were in wheelchairs and in abject pain, and they found it difficult to move in any way. I find their dignity and their strength inspiring.

That visit prompted me to hold a members’ business debate later in 2017 on the need for a national continence strategy, because all too often mesh was used as a quick fix for incontinence issues. As a country, we should be far more proactive in encouraging women and men to talk about when they leak and the fact that humans naturally do leak—the majority of us will do at some point, but that is okay. There are easy ways of fixing that with proper pelvic floor physiotherapy, rather than the insertion of potentially devastating implants, which are used all too often, or the use of pharmaceutical products that should never have made it out of trial phase, given the impact and physical injury that we know they can cause.

Although the report rightly focuses on transvaginal mesh, because that is the type of implant that the majority of mesh survivors have received, I would like to remind Parliament of the forgotten survivors. I believe that Donald Cameron pointed out that the pause on surgery did not apply to the operations on those who have suffered mesh surgery to fix hernias. They have received very little recognition, no corrective surgery and certainly no financial payout. I cannot see why they are discounted from this.

The cabinet secretary will remember that I previously raised with her the case of Lesley Hughes, who is a constituent of mine. Lesley underwent mesh surgery to help to relieve pain around her groin hernia in 2017. After the mesh was implanted, she found herself in even worse pain; indeed, the pain was so bad that she could not move at all. She had to rely on a walking stick or even a wheelchair, as the pain was so unmanageable, and she found it tricky to return to work.

Lesley travelled to London in October 2018 to have the mesh removed privately rather than on our NHS. Although that helped the pain and mobility, she still has chronic fatigue, pain, migraines and reduced mobility. She is now saving money to buy a scooter. She has been financially hit, because she has had to reduce her hours of work, and she has been physically unable to work full time. She was offered removal surgery from the NHS, but she paid for the surgery privately because, as she told me, she had no trust in, or evidence of good practice from, the surgeon who was assigned to her. She was not willing to risk matters getting worse.

I can see that my time is coming to an end.

I once again thank all the mesh survivors, and I assure the movers of all the amendments that we will support all of them. I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute to the debate.