The experience of women reporting damage from vaginal mesh: a reflexive thematic analysis (23 March 2023)

Summary

Research paper by Toye et al. published in the Lancet on the experience of women reporting damage from vaginal mesh.

Content

The UK’s First Do No Harm report outlined missed opportunities to prevent harm and emphasised the need to incorporate patient voices into healthcare. Due to concerns about, and the subsequent suspension, of mesh for urinary incontinence, thousands of women face the decision about mesh removal surgery. 

This new study by Toye et al. has explored the experience of living with complications attributed to vaginal mesh surgery so that this knowledge can contribute to improvements in care for those considering mesh, or mesh removal, surgery. Key concerns from women are:

• I blindly trusted the surgeon.
• I feel dehumanised, like meat.
• Mesh surgery has stolen me.
• I am more than the sum of my body parts.
• Healthcare professionals are fallible.
• Mesh removal? Between a rock and a hard place.
• Seeking another way of knowing in communities.
• Institutional denial.

The issues surrounding surgical mesh have impacts for many areas of clinical medicine, but also implications for device development and innovation.

There is key learning for the role of industry, healthcare provision, autonomy, women’s rights, and health education.

The study findings provide important insights into experiences that, if placed at the centre of healthcare systems, will ensure safer and more inclusive healthcare. 

Social sciences can make a positive contribution to healthcare education, practice, and policy. Drawing from a group of women with unique experiences of harm from mesh surgery, the findings support an embodied and dialectic approach in healthcare interactions that can re build trust and contribute to effective and shared decision making in a range of contexts. 

The findings may also translate to other health setting where treatments aimed to care have caused harm.