Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what reason Baroness Cumberlege's review of vaginal mesh implants will not include an audit of ventral mesh rectopexy surgery.

Using Hospital Episodes Statistics (HES), NHS Digital is already in the process of undertaking a retrospective audit (secondary analysis of existing data) of surgery for stress urinary incontinence and vaginal prolapse, which will help the National Health Service to better understand complications related to surgery using vaginal mesh. Analysis will include the number of patients who have undergone an operation and will investigate in part their subsequent interactions with the NHS through hospital outpatient appointments. This approach to the analysis of HES is novel and the results will be classified as experimental statistics.

The retrospective audit will not include patients that have undergone rectopexy, as this is a procedure used to treat rectal prolapse rather than stress urinary incontinence or vaginal prolapse (although on occasion, rectopexy may be undertaken with stress urinary incontinence or vaginal prolapse procedures).

Adding the entirety of the rectal prolapse patient cohort to this particular data set may distort the results and therefore impact the ability to draw conclusions specifically for stress urinary incontinence and vaginal prolapse. The focus at this point is on stress urinary incontinence and vaginal prolapse.