I’d just like to say that I know the doctor involved. I read the reports here first of all and then was told who it was and was shocked.
I’ve known him In a professional capacity as well as outside of work. Though this was some years Ago. He had the reputation of being a good consultant and certainly someone who’d I’d have been happy to have care from inc surgery. He was certainly no misogynist and cared about his patients.
I don’t know what went wrong. He’s been door stepped by the media and I read in The Times today that he said he started to have mental health problems and as soon as he realised it had affected his work he resigned of his own accord and is now totally retired and very much wants to apologise to anyone affected. He’s genuinely a nice bloke and I can’t imagine how he must be feeling.
I do think that the nhs needs to be more robust in it’s surveillance of outcomes. To try and prevent repeats of this, or indeed a truly dodgy doctor. Sadly as far as I know there’s no system/no person checking the stats of individual surgeons/doctors. So it takes a colleague.....another doctor, a nurse, a GP to notice a pattern and raise it. By the time an individual has seen a pattern so many patients can have been affected.
Even the individual doctor concerned may not realise for some time. They do some surgery, the patient is discharged. Back home things aren’t right still, in pain, etc. They go back to their GP, maybe get fobbed off a bit. Either give up and suffer or eventually get referred back to a gynaecologist. Probably ask for a different one. But if there’s 8-12 consultants at that hospital the women getting referred get spread around those other doctors so they don’t notice for a while, the original doctor has no idea.....there needs to be a better system.