Meeting of the Parliament (Hybrid) 08 September 2020
There are very few issues that unite all five parties in the Parliament, but all three issues that the Cumberlege report addresses significantly add to that total. I, too, pay tribute to Lady Cumberlege and her team for a first-class report on all three areas that they looked into. However, I will, obviously, concentrate on the mesh issue.
I would like to make a number of points to take us forward.
I very much welcome the Scottish Government’s commitment to create a Scottish patient safety commissioner. That is long overdue, and the commissioner could be a huge advantage for people who find themselves in the position that the mesh women found themselves in many years ago. I will make three or four suggestions for consideration by the cabinet secretary and the Government in taking forward the consultation on the creation of that post.
First, to maximise the impact of and the confidence in such an commissioner, we should follow the example of the ombudsmen and make the position a parliamentary appointment, not a Scottish Government or NHS appointment. To maximise confidence, the person must not be seen to be part of the internal system, where the problems arise in the first place.
Secondly, the commissioner must have a wide remit. Their remit must not be so narrow that it becomes ineffectual.
Thirdly, the commissioner must have powers. One of the shortcomings of the ombudsmen is that, at the end of the day, their powers to implement their recommendations are extremely limited. The commissioner must have teeth and the power to prevent mistakes before they are made, let alone to rectify them once they have been made.
Finally, let us not make the same mistake that we made with the Scottish Human Rights Commission, whose commissioner is not allowed to investigate individual cases. I see the patient safety commissioner being able to look at generic issues to do with patient safety, as well as able to investigate individual cases.
If those powers, that remit and that status as a parliamentary commissioner are awarded, we will have a very strong patient safety commissioner, which is what we are looking for.
I very much agree with the cabinet secretary’s motion and Jackson Carlaw’s amendment, which proposes that the Parliament believes that the Scottish Government’s actions should
“include the early prospect of full transvaginal mesh removal surgery being undertaken by surgeons who enjoy the full confidence of the women affected, fully funded by the NHS.”
I think that the cabinet secretary has said that she agrees with that. That is fundamental to the basic principle that the patient comes first.
I welcome, as part of the mesh removal service, the individual case review whereby the patient, along with the relevant consultant or medics, takes a joint decision about the best course of action for them as an individual. No one is qualified to tell a patient what is best for them other than that patient in consultation with their doctor. [Interruption.] I will just finish my point.
Fundamentally, a significant number of women will have reached, or will reach, the conclusion that the only person on the planet who can safely remove their mesh is Dr Veronikis in America. However, we do not know how many women there are in that category, nor the individual complexities of their cases, and nor should we. I am not going to get into who said what when, why Dr Veronikis is not here in Scotland or why we are not there—primarily, I am not interested in that. I just want us to get to a position where, one way or another, the women who need their mesh removed by Dr Veronikis and see that as their only solution get access to his services. I believe that we owe it to those women to make sure that that happens.
The National Health Service in Scotland, and indeed the rest of the UK, has a tradition of sending people abroad for any procedure that cannot be carried out safely in our country. That is not new. What is probably new in this case is the potential scale at which we need to do that. As a Parliament, a Government and a society, we need to take it on the chin that we owe it to those women to foot the bill for those whose only solution is to go to the States and have their mesh removed by Dr Veronikis.
In the short term, that is the most important aspect of the debate, because we cannot allow the lives of those women to be destroyed by the failure to remove the mesh that probably should never have been inserted, and certainly not in the way it was, into their bodies in the first place.