Lord Mackinlay’s Mission To Help Others Gain Access To Bionic Hands

Lord Craig Mackinlay recently took his seat as the UK Parliament’s first “Bionic Lord” in the House of Lords, with a mission to raise the quality of prosthetics offered to amputees and the general awareness of sepsis. In September 2023, the former South Thanet MP contracted the illness and was placed into a 16-day-long induced coma to save his life. He awoke in shock to find his limbs had turned completely black and would later lose both arms and legs to amputation.

Speaking on his experience, Lord Mackinlay said that his limbs were “like plastic… you could almost knock them… they were black, desiccating, clenched. They managed to save above the elbows and above the knees… so you might say I’m lucky. I haven’t got a medical degree but I know what dead things look like. I was surprisingly stoic about it… I don’t know why I was. It might have been the various cocktail of drugs I was on.”

After a lengthy rehabilitation process to build up his muscles, Lord Mackinlay was fitted with prosthetic legs and then began the process of finding two prosthetic arms in 2024. “You don’t realise how much you do with your hands… use your phone, hold the hand of your child, touch your wife, do the garden”. He began his prosthetic journey with bionic limbs provided by the NHS, but decided to look to the wider market for his new hands after struggling with the limited capabilities of his original prosthetic hands, likening them to “something out of medieval times”.

In October 2024, following a peerage in Rishi Sunak’s dissolution honours list, Lord Mackinlay of Richborough became the first quadruple amputee to sit in the House of Lords with the COVVI Hand that helped him “feel whole again”. His mission is now to help others receive the level of care he had access to and end the “postcode lottery” present within the NHS system. “We need to do better. It’s 2024. We put a man on the moon 55 years ago. I can’t believe we still can’t get people the right prosthetic if they want it… if you are going to keep people alive at great expense, then please spend that final bit of money to make whatever life you have after worth living.”