Vaginal Mesh Implants: Compensation

Baroness Brinton Excerpts

Thursday 5th September 2024 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Brinton (LD)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, for securing this debate and for her unstinting commitment to ensuring that victims of vaginal mesh, sodium valproate, Primodos and other medical problems and scandals continue to have their voices heard. Her report for the last Government, First Do No Harm, published five years ago now, was extraordinary and impossible to ignore, and those of its recommendations that have been implemented have started to change the way that support for patient victims is delivered. I hope—and I will come back to this later—that it is also starting the change in culture that we need to see inside the NHS. We all love our NHS and sometimes it can be hard to admit that some of the senior doctors within it are not the best people to support patients and ensure that patients feel they are getting the right help they need when things go wrong.

I am particularly pleased about the role of the Patient Safety Commissioner, which I remember us debating in 2020. Dr Henrietta Hughes is making a brilliant start, and I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Bennett, for the comments that she made about that. However, I repeat a question I asked when the post was first set up: is the office of the Patient Safety Commissioner getting enough resources to do the job that she so clearly has to? I have no doubt that she is a very able woman but I am concerned about the volume that her office is dealing with.

I pay tribute to the victims of not just vaginal mesh but sodium valproate and Primodos, who have continued to tell their stories. We know that repeatedly telling your story is painful too, but we need to hear them. I thank the noble Baronesses, Lady Sugg and Lady Wyld, and the noble Lord, Lord Mancroft, who told his friend’s personal story, all of whom reminded us of how dreadful the position is. While the difference between these problems and the infected blood scandal is that we are not seeing fatalities, we underestimate the long-term life changes that all these victims have faced, some of them the children of those who were fed medicines during pregnancy, not one of them at fault at all in any way.

There is one voice that we have not heard: that of the NHS whistleblowers. I shall mention one person of whom I had not been aware until there was an article about her in the British Medical Journal earlier this year. Sohier Elneil is a urogynaecological surgeon and an expert in women’s pain. She is the founder of the first NHS vaginal mesh removal centre and a tireless champion of supporting the victims and sorting out the problems. I was shocked to read that, after she started talking about this issue in 2005, she was excluded from events by doctors, then personally attacked and reported to the General Medical Council multiple times, mainly by fellow consultants—those who were the biggest implanters of mesh. She said:

“I was very upset. It felt like a war. They were saying I was removing mesh and harming patients unnecessarily”.


Professor Elneil continued with her campaign, and I have to say that her story did not stop there. She also uncovered some of the doctors being encouraged with financial incentives from the providers of vaginal mesh. It is good that both Henrietta Hughes’ report and that of the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, said that things needed to become transparent. The last Government refused to allow those records to go on to the register at the GMC but they should be on that register, not kept elsewhere, because if a member of the public wants to find something out, the GMC will be the first place they go. Can the Minister say whether that will happen?

Others have already talked about the time limit. I shall make brief mention of the issue relayed by the noble Baroness, Lady Berridge, about the type of inquiry and the ability to make effective reports. In my portfolio I have covered virtually all these inquiries over the past 18 months, and I have heard every single group of victims say that another inquiry has provided the right response for them. None of the inquiries has yet been resolved—even those, such as the Post Office Horizon inquiry and the infected blood inquiry, which we think have been resolved. If the Government will not revisit the deadline, they will be dragged kicking and screaming into a higher level of inquiry as more cases are revealed. Please can the Government, preferably via the Cabinet Office, bring together the learning from all these inquiries about what goes wrong in government to make these things happen?