Great to meet with Sling the Mesh campaign outside of parliament today

It was great to meet with Kath Sansom from the Sling the Mesh campaign outside parliament this week, for a rally urging the government to implement the recommendations from the First Do No Harm report.

Published over five years ago, this report has been gathering dust on the shelf ever since. Kath’s campaign group has brought together thousands of women living through one of the biggest health scandals of our time.

Surgical mesh is made of polypropylene plastic – the same material used for plastic drinks bottles. It is used to strengthen weak tissue in operations such as bladder leaks, prolapses and hernias. But it can shrink, twist, degrade, harden, fragment and leach toxins causing hideous pain, discomfort, disease and allergies.

There are people across the UK living in unimaginable pain because of the mesh in their body. Lives have been literally ruined, jobs lost, marriages broken, families destroyed. One woman I met had mesh wrongly inserted and it cannot now be removed by any doctor in the UK – it’s such a specialised operation that only a doctor in the US will attempt it. At an unaffordable cost.

This is such a scandal it’s hard to believe that more people don’t know about it.

 Since being elected I have written letters to the government and met a member of the House of Lords with responsibility for it, but so far haven’t seen any progress. I will keep campaigning for my constituent and the thousands like her who deserve an apology, financial redress, and specialist medical support – as recommended in the Cumberlege report of 2020.

I’d also like to see more attention paid to the importance of proper pelvic floor training for women post childbirth. In France and Belgium every woman is taught about it before leaving hospital by a trained physio. Here we have adverts on the TV suggesting it’s quite normal for women to have leaks when they run for a bus or go to the gym. We can do better than this. Prevention is always better than cure. Let’s get smart – I’ll be raising this with the Department of Health too.