Patient Safety Spotlight interview with Kath Sansom, Founder of Sling the Mesh

Summary

This is part of our series of Patient Safety Spotlight interviews, where we talk to people working for patient safety about their role and what motivates them. 

Kath talks to us about why she set up Sling the Mesh and the significant impact that campaigning has on her life. She also highlights the need to establish systems that will identify and prevent avoidable harm, including long term tracking to investigate trends of harm, reporting of industry payments to clinicians and making logging side effects mandatory for healthcare professionals.

Content

Read other posts by Kath on the hub:

• A mesh ‘audit’ is meaningless unless we have reliable data and hear from those who have been harmed - a blog by Kath Sansom
• Tokenism in patient engagement is unethical—but it is also dangerous. A blog by Kath Sansom
• Regulatory flaws: Women were catastrophically failed in the mesh, Primodos and Sodium Valproate tragedies

About the author

Kath Sansom set up Sling The Mesh in 2015 with just 20 members. It has grown to a support network of almost 10,000 people from around the world and is a vital place for people to connect and learn about mesh complications. Sling The Mesh is a patient safety advocacy group campaigning for justice for those affected, with the long term goals of improved regulation and oversight in UK healthcare. Kath is passionate about raising awareness of the flaws in modern scientific evidence and about payments from industry that can lead to bias in prescribing and treatment options. The campaign has been successful in laying the foundations for a Sunshine Payment Act in the UK, which would create an open database to log such payments, giving patient safety campaigners greater power to openly critique latest healthcare evidence.