Mesh Implants

Part of 2. Questions to the Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Services – in the Senedd at 2:29 pm on 13 December 2017.

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Photo of Angela Burns Angela Burns Conservative 2:29, 13 December 2017

This is a horrific story: a 10 per cent failure rate on average throughout the UK, and, my understanding is, throughout the world. One of the things that really concerns me is that these devices were allowed to be used because, although they had not been tested, they had gone through the medical devices process, under some sort of guidance-like similarity. I just wonder, Cabinet Secretary, whether you could produce a written statement to inform us how the medical devices guidelines work, and what process any medical device that would be inserted into our bodies—what the normal run rate, what the normal processes are. Because I do have a concern that this particular brand of tape—and there has been some questions in the past about the kind of tapes used to hold hernias in; some of those have been made of these highly synthetic materials, and have caused problems. So, I'd be really interested, and I think we'd all be really interested, in understanding how we allow these devices to be used, and what the guidelines, the processes, the procedures are for safeguards to make sure that we only let stuff that's been really well tested into our Welsh NHS.