Continued Petitions

PE1517, by Elaine Holmes and Olive McIlroy, is on polypropylene mesh medical devices. We last considered this petition on 28 September, when we heard evidence from the petitioners and Dr Wael Agur. The clerk’s note provides a summary of that evidence session, and circulated with it are a number of submissions from mesh survivors. We record our thanks to the people who have taken the time to make those submissions; many are highly personal and were probably difficult to draft.

Members will recall that we agreed to write to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Sport, Shona Robison, to set out our concerns about the availability of the updated patient information leaflet and the presence of outdated information on Scottish Government and NHS Scotland websites. The cabinet secretary provided a response on Tuesday this week, confirming that the chief medical officer wrote to all health boards in May to request that the literature that is available in hospital and primary care premises is up to date. She advises that NHS inform has reviewed and updated its website and has provided a link to the current version of the stress urinary incontinence patient information leaflet. That link has been added to the Scottish Government’s website.

The cabinet secretary adds that the Scottish Government is working with Healthcare Improvement Scotland to establish a mesh oversight group, which will work with health boards to ensure that the recommendations of the independent review are fully implemented and give further consideration to the patient information that is available.

We have previously agreed to publish a report on the petition and we have secured time for a debate, although we await confirmation of the timing of that debate. The deputy convener and I hope to meet Professor Alison Britton to discuss the issues and concerns that have been raised in evidence to the committee about the review and Professor Britton’s review of the review.

Do members have any thoughts or suggestions for further action on the petition?

It will take place as diaries permit. Professor Britton contacted us and said that she thought that it would be useful for us to meet. That is helpful, because we are wrestling with, and there is no doubt that the petitioners are wrestling with, the purpose of the review. It is clear that the review is not to address the substance of the report, which the patients have been unhappy with; it is about the process and what the Government can learn from that. My concern is that that review might misrepresent to the petitioners what its outcome might be. I do not think that it will revisit the findings or recommendations of the report.

It is interesting to note that there was a debate on the issue in Westminster Hall. It strikes me that public awareness is catching up with the individual experiences of those women, and it feels as if something bigger will develop out of this rather than the consideration of individual clinical decisions. We recognise the petitioners’ work in highlighting the matter.

There is also the fact that, when Alex Neil was Cabinet Secretary for Health and Wellbeing, he stepped in and said that there should be a moratorium but the practice still continued.

Given the evidence, it is difficult to see why that moratorium would not have been sustained. However, we are not clinicians, so we do not really know what the other options might be.

We have come back time and again to the issue that the petitioners were not believed. That is clearly an issue for them. It was not believed that the procedure and their subsequent suffering were connected.

Do we agree to meet in private to look at the report ahead of the debate? That would help our consideration.

Members indicated agreement.

Is there anything else that we can usefully do at this time, apart from recognising where we have got to on the issues that have been highlighted? I recognise that we will have a debate, that we will produce a report, and that there are still issues for the Government in respect of what its authority is. The issue for the Government is really whether it can follow through on the question of the moratorium.

We might want to reflect on that in considering what other information we want to add to the report. We can go back and establish what evidence we were given in that regard. I think that there was some evidence that enabled us to establish that there was not an absolute moratorium.

As we have already agreed that we will consider a draft report in private session, I suggest that we look to gather any other evidence that will inform that report. I do not mean oral evidence; I mean an up-to-date report from health boards about their understanding of the use of these procedures. In due course, the deputy convener and I will report back on our meeting with Professor Britton. Is that agreed?

Members indicated agreement.