A doctor, whose medical blunders led a pregnant mu
A doctor, whose medical blunders led a pregnant mum to describe her Caesarian op as like a scene from a horror movie, faces being struck off next week.
Dr John Evans-Appiah, 58, also made a catalogue of basic mistakes that left a boy dead in the dentists’ chair during a routine tooth extraction, the GMC heard.
The three-week case was told how the anaesthetist caused a mother to scream in agony as she felt a surgeon’s knife cut her open during a Caesarean.
Mum Hazel Woolger described the op as like something out of the the gory horror film ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’.
Today (fri) the GMC formally found the facts of 17 allegations proved against Evans-Appiah.
The panel will now rule on his future next week.
Dr Evans-Appiah was banned from practising after he bungled the sedation of Darren Denholm, a normal, healthy 10-year-old.
The lad suffered excruciating pain before dying of a cardiac arrest at an Edinburgh dental clinic barely 20 minutes after his arrival.
His shocked mother, Isla Denholm, of Armadale, West Lothian, reacted by saying: ‘Don’t be stupid, he’s only come here to have a tooth out.
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Evans-Appiah then tried to cover up his mistakes to a fatal accident inquiry by faking medical records and pressurising colleagues to lie to investigators.
Exactly three weeks later, on Friday October 30, 1998, he botched the anaesthetic a second time during Mrs Woolger’s Caesarian op.
Mrs Woolger, 33, of Barming, Kent, who was 32 weeks pregnant, warned Evans-Appiah she still had full sensation in her abdomen.
But Evans-Appiah told surgeon Prosenjit Sarker to slice open her abdomen and remove her baby boy Billy from her womb.
Mother-of-five Mrs Woolger likened the pain she experienced during the ordeal to ‘being hit in stomach with a sledgehammer’ and said it was like something out of ‘A Nightmare on Elm Street’.
But even though she screamed out, Evans-Appiah ignored her obvious distress until late in the operation.
Evans-Appiah’s ‘shocking lack of professional standards’ were shown during the shambolic Caesarian section.
At least two theatre staff at Maidstone Hospital saw him drop a device called a ‘bougie’ on the floor, wipe it on his trousers and put it in his mouth before sliding it into the mum-of-five’s windpipe.
And Evans-Appiah once bragged to a colleague that in his job he takes a patient ‘on a walk between life and death’.
Instead of acting with the professionalism his job demanded, the GMC accepted claims he was incompetent and absent-minded in relation to the two patients – in one case fatally.
Dr Evans-Appiah, from Ghana, trained in the Ukraine and came to Britain in 1973.
He was suspended from using anaesthetics after the incident in Edinburgh, and was suspended from the Medical Register earlier this year.
The GMC found the facts of 17 allegations proved against Dr Evans-Appiah, of (7) Cambrian Road, Leyton, London.
In the case of Darren these included failing to induce a deep enough level of anaesthesia, even though the patient moved; wrongly administering a local anaesthetic, making a wrong diagnosis; failing to follow standard life support procedures; failing to display professional leadership during resuscitation attempts; and attempting to interfere with the evidence and mislead any investigation.
In Mrs Woolger’s case, the allegations included failing to secure adequate anaesthesia for the patient; ignoring her when she said she still had sensation in her stomach, and failing to respond with urgency to the patient’s condition.
On Monday the GMC will decide whether the charges constitute serious professional misconduct.
The panel will then decide which penalty to impose.
Afterwards Isla Denham said ‘I’ve been waiting for two years for this.
It’s been a long haul.
I feel absolutely delighted.
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Evans-Appiah has worked at hospitals across the length and breadth of the UK, including Luton, Stevenage, Stoke, south Wales, Worcester, Birmingham, Bury St Edmunds, Gloucester, Lincs, Redhill, Enfield, Eastbourne, Falkirk, Edinburgh, and the Scottish borders.
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