Meeting of the Parliament 24 October 2023
At the outset, I want to recognise the hundreds of mesh-injured women who have fought so hard for so long for their voices to be heard. They have lived with debilitating pain. For some, their symptoms and internal injuries have been so excruciating that they have had to give up their jobs. Others have become socially isolated because managing their symptoms is so difficult and depleting. The impact on their physical and mental health has been horrendous, compounded by the betrayal by a healthcare system that repeatedly told them that there was nothing wrong. The women felt diminished and disempowered by the clinicians whom they trusted to care for them. Heartbreakingly, one woman said that she felt like an “insignificant little nothing.”
I pay tribute to Elaine Holmes, Olive McIlroy and the Scottish Mesh Survivors, who, almost 10 years ago, started a campaign with a parliamentary petition to rectify the mistakes that mesh-injured women have endured. My colleague Jackson Carlaw and former MSPs Alex Neil and Neil Findlay heard their call to action and took up the cause in the Scottish Parliament. They helped to provide a platform for women to share their experiences of surgical mesh, but it should never have had to come to that. Our healthcare system should be patient centred and not stacked against them.
The latest review from Professor Alison Britton makes for grim and difficult reading. It examined 40,000 pages of medical notes and 18 case records of women with transvaginal mesh implants and found that many of them were not informed of the risks and implications of the treatment if it were to go wrong. Some had conditions that would not have been helped by a mesh implant in the first place and, horrifyingly, many were misled about the extent to which the mesh had been removed by the NHS. One patient lost her bladder, and she said that what had happened to her was “bordering on criminal”. Another described the feeling of being “deceived” and “gaslit” by clinicians. The legacy of distrust from the transvaginal mesh scandal will endure for a long time to come.
Professor Britton’s review has made 21 recommendations, which span communication with patients; the creation of a mesh register for procedures in Scotland, the wider UK and abroad; clarification around the mesh referral and treatment pathways from the patient perspective; requirements for post-operative care following surgery abroad; and improvements to the consent process. Today, the minister has thanked Professor Britton, so I am sure that she will agree that those are reasonable and common-sense suggestions, which the Scottish Government should implement at pace with the appropriate partners.
The minister’s motion suggests that support for mesh-injured women is already well-aligned with Professor Britton’s recommendation, but a polite way of replying to that is that it is a striking example of noncommittal political parlance if ever I heard one.
Professor Britton authored the 2018 investigative report into the initial review of the use of transvaginal mesh. The minister said today that she is grateful to Professor Britton and that she wants to find ways to build back trust, yet five years on from its publication, Professor Britton confirmed that not one of the 46 recommendations have been implemented by the SNP Government—hardly a track record to fill us with confidence.