Table 1.

Description of included articles and their participants

Study	Number of participants Methods for recruitment of participants	Location of study	Inclusion criteria and focus of study	Timeframes	Analysis method
Bramwell and Sullivan (2019) [12]	23 participants Recruited women via a mesh support Facebook group Women’s written narratives collected via emails	New Zealand	Focused on the experiences of women affected by the implantation of surgical mesh	Report submitted in April 2019 The mean length of time participants had lived with surgical mesh was 9 years	Braun and Clarke’s method for thematic analysis
Brown (2019) (thesis) [13]	7 participants Used modified standardised questionnaire and qualitative interview	New Zealand	Women who have experienced TVM complications	Research started January 2018 Women had TVM surgeries in 2002, 2006, 2008 (3 pts), 2010 and 2014	Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenological method was used
Brown (2020) (published article) [14]	7 participants Used modified standardised questionnaire and qualitative interview	New Zealand	Women who have experienced TVM complications	Research started January 2018 Women had TVM surgeries in 2002, 2006, 2008 (3 pts), 2010 and 2014	Van Manen’s hermeneutic phenomenological method was used
Dunn et al. (2014) [15]	84 participants Phone interview using 2 open-ended questions Sufficient data was collected from 51 for one question and 71 for the other question	USA	Women who have had TVM as primary surgery and experienced complications	Study conducted from January 2006 to December 2011 The mean length of time from the index surgery to the study was 4.5 years	The collected data was analysed using qualitative description with low-inference interpretation to provide a straightforward, unadorned description of women’s experiences of mesh complications
Izett-Kay et al. (2020) [16]	752 participants among 1766 recruited participants answered a free-text response component of a questionnaire on paper, online or in a telephone interview	UK	All women who have had TVM implants for primary surgery	Study published in 2020 Women had surgeries between 2010 and 2018. The median length of time from surgery to response was 46 months	Braun and Clarke’s method for thematic analysis

TVM transvaginal mesh