9th Mar 2023, 11:40 AM – Senate Therapeutic Goods Amendment (2022 Measures No. 1) Bill 2022 - in Committee - Extending reporting requirement to GPs

The majority voted against amendments introduced by West Australian Senator Jordon Steele-John (Greens), which means they failed.

What did the amendments do?

Senator Steele-John explained that:

In moving these amendments today I want to dedicate them to the 150,000 Australian women who received surgically implanted transvaginal mesh. Most commonly, these procedures were undertaken, these devices were sought, in relation to the treatment of pelvic prolapse, stress related urinary incontinence or, additionally, complications resulting from childbirth. These were things that people sought to access, devices that they sought to have implanted in order to treat conditions that were causing them great distress and having a profound impact on their lives. These devices were promoted to women as being safe, and they were not safe.

When women spoke up about the reality of what these devices were doing to them—the pain, the blood, the inability to engage in intimate relations with their partners—they were dismissed; they were ignored year after year. And women continued to suffer. This medical scandal resulted in the largest women's based health class action in Australian history—and rightly so, given that this was one of the most profound failures in medical regulation and one of the most dangerous products ever allowed into human bodies since thalidomide. Australian women led the world in holding manufacturers and regulators to account. Australian women, although they had experienced the most horrendous mistreatment at the hands of the manufacturers, at the hands of medical practitioners and at the hands of dismissive regulators, came forward to their parliament in 2018 and trusted their parliament, gave evidence to their parliament, went to their MPs and said, 'I am willing to talk, on the public record, about some of the most personal, some of the most intimate impacts of medical device failure—in the public and in the media—and I do this so that this may never happen again to anybody else.' That's what they did.

Four years ago the Senate inquiry handed down its recommendations as a result of that evidence. Finally, a government has coughed up a response to some of those recommendations. Yet what we see here today is the half-baked misimplementation of the very first recommendation of that inquiry. The very first recommendation of that inquiry was to create a mandatory reporting system that covered healthcare practitioners so that, if in the future such a device is in circulation, causing pain and harm, the regulator will have the data to alert the community, yet what the government has put forward is a mandatory reporting framework solely for hospitals, for healthcare facilities, missing the vital role of general practitioners in reporting. The reality is that when a device such as these malfunctions—and it relates particularly to gynaecological issues—people are not going to go straight to their ED; they're going to want to talk with somebody they have a relationship with. Because this is clouded in shame, in a context where women's pain is so often dismissed, people are going to want to talk to a person they have a built trust with, and that is often their GP.

Amendment text

See OpenAustralia.org.au for the amendment text.