Dr. Suzanne O'Sullivan:

As I said, I know there have been problems and I heard the women this morning and have met many of them in my clinic. There is no doubt there have been problems caused as a result of these operations. There is no doubt about that whatsoever. Again, our door is always open. We prioritise any patient who is referred with a problem related to mesh. We get them into our system as quickly as we possibly can. We prioritise them over other patients and it is a big issue for us because with Covid our waiting lists have really grown but we have dedicated time, we have a dedicated multidisciplinary team, we discuss all the complicated patients and we schedule surgery because some of these operations can be very big. They can last for several hours and we must put aside at least half a day, and often a day, aside to do the really complicated surgical mesh removals when required. Again, I can speak for our service in Cork. We are absolutely cognisant of the issue. We aim to do our very best by the women who come to us. We prioritise referrals. We see them as quickly as possible. We offer them a large range of interventions.

One of the questions that arises relates to total mesh removal. One of the problems is that when we see people, we look at their issues and try to look at causative factors and what is going to make them better. Often total mesh removal, from my clinical perspective or that of our multidisciplinary clinical perspective, may not be, we feel, in the best interests of the patient. It is a difficult dilemma to be trying to say there are other solutions to issues that may or may not be related to the mesh and that we look at trying interventions like physiotherapy, pain management, etc. We definitely will remove the mesh when we are convinced it is the absolute root cause of problems and when we are confident that doing so is going make the woman better. The difficulty or concern is often that full mesh removal can make things an awful lot worse and leave the woman much worse off afterwards.

We have looked after women who have come from abroad, including from the UK, after total mesh removal who have had very significant problems and who were really harmed and had dreadful complications as a result of surgery.