Mr Andrew Evans

Mr Andrew Evans 2022-03-22 Person 1 5 0

Otolaryngologist Andrew S Evans saw me at the Edinburgh Lauriston hospital. I had been referred to him with chronic pain in the throat and a weak voice. I can speak no more than 20 minutes, then my voice vanishes. This makes giving longer work presentations impossible. When I arrived Mr Evans pointed me to the patient chair. It was high like a bar stool. With my arthritis it is painful to climb onto stools. I asked him to lower it. He did. Since most throat patients are over 60, it does not make a lot of sense to have them climb and perch on a high chair. Later he inserted a tiny camera to look at the inside of my throat and upper chest. I have had this procedure before. It is uncomfortable and sometimes painful, but it is necessary. With the tube down my throat Mr Evans asked me to look at a monitor behind my back. I tried to turn my head. This made the pain from the tube prohibitive. I motioned to him to turn the chair. He did so by a fraction. I asked him for a second time. He turned the char a bit more so that by twisting my neck I could just about see the screen. Mr Evans must have done this procedure hundreds of times. He must know that it is the worst possible position for a patient to twist the neck and turn the head. Why did he not tell me to turn the chair to face the screen before he inserted the tube? Early on he had asked me how I spell my first name. Later on he asked in which country I grew up. I have been a UK citizen for 42 years and paid UK taxes ever since. No one in Britain has ever quizzed me about my origins. While colour should not come into it, for the record, Mr Evans, his nurse assistant and I are all white. 10 years earlier my throat had been examined in London. The consultant at the initial consultation and the one at follow-up had both been of Asian descent, probably Pakistani. I would not have dreamt of asking them where they “come from”. They would have been alienated. I asked Mr Evans to send me a copy of his report to my GP. He did. In the report he says nothing about the fact that my voice stops working when I speak for longer. Instead he calls me a smoker. We had not discussed smoking. I do not smoke. With a throat condition like mine it would be irresponsible to smoke. I asked him to amend his report. He did. But the new version has been filed elsewhere, where no one sees it. When I spoke to my GP and later to the voice therapist, both thought that my condition is trivial and that I smoke to make it worse. From the beginning I felt unwelcome in Mr Evans’ clinic. When I could not remedy the problems with his report I decided to post this review. I audio-recorded our consultation. I have offered Mr Evans the recording. It bears out what I say in this review.