Medicines and Medical Devices Bill

Debate between Baroness Fookes and Baroness Cumberlege

Committee stage & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 3rd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 28th October 2020 Grand Committee

[The Deputy Chairman of Committees (Baroness Fookes) (Con)]

I have received a request to speak after the Minister. I call the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege.

[Baroness Cumberlege (Con) [V]]

My Lords, it has been a really interesting debate. One of the things that I have found so wonderful in this House is all the professors. I did not go to university and, when I listen to the professors and the way they care for their students—and in this case I am something of a student—I really value it. I thank the noble Lord, Lord Patel, for pointing out the dilemmas that we face. They are very difficult. I am sure that the Minister also feels that: it is how you balance what we are trying to achieve as a successful United Kingdom in innovation, marketing and all the rest of it, and the dilemma of safety as well.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Kakkar, very much. I need to read very carefully in Hansard what he said and then come to some conclusions. I am not sure that we have quite cracked it, but I believe we are working towards it. The noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy, had some really interesting ideas about how we can take this forward, and we need more work to be done on it.

I want to say one thing. In the review, we were so horrified by the stories that we heard that we said we had to do something to prevent further surgeries taking place in women who were suffering so deeply. We called it the pause; we went to NHS England and the department and very quickly they agreed to our pause, with six safety conditions that had to be introduced if it was to be lifted—and, of course, they still have not been introduced. That was in July 2018.

The interesting thing about the pause is that, because surgeons were prevented from using what they would see as the normal solutions to stress urinary incontinence, with pelvic mesh, they started to think of different ways in which to do things and help women, ensuring that the discomfort that they had through these conditions was ameliorated. We are getting innovation in a very interesting way. I am convinced that such innovation would not have taken place if we had not introduced the pause. But it should not have been us, the review team, who introduced it. It should have been the healthcare system, which had put forward some measures and thoughts about it years before, but nothing happened. Of course, that was one of the burdens that I carried throughout the review—that promises were made and nothing happened. We called the healthcare system glacial; it just did not move. There are some hugely bright people in this country and throughout the healthcare system and beyond, in universities and everything else. Surely, if we could only utilise the wonderful brains that we have in this country, we could do much better.

I thank my noble friend for the very full summing-up today. The categories of risk relevant to devices have been so badly used in the past in terms of how pressure has been put on to change the risk when people knew that harm was being committed. We have a meeting with the MHRA, and I am sure that a lot of these issues will be discussed.

I thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for introducing the amendment. It is very difficult to pick up somebody else’s work, but he did it with his usual tremendous skill.