Unfortunately, my experience of Clinic M has been very negative. When I tried to offer my feedback to Mr Grime directly, he informed me ‘I don’t want your feedback’. My overarching concern relates to issues around consent and the management of the surgical procedure, and feeling the attitudes of Mr Grime and Ms Thomson were dismissive and unprofessional. I went to Clinic M to have minor surgery, privately, to remove two cysts on my back. I booked this procedure with Mr Grime, an experienced surgeon. After an initial diagnostic consultation with Ms Pauline Thomson, who has a background in Dental Therapy and a BSc in Dermatology, I contacted ClinicM reception to confirm that Mr Grime would be carrying out the procedure and was advised that he would. Appointment correspondence stated ‘Simple Cyst removal with Peter Grime’. However, I was lying on my stomach, having had local anaesthetic injected into my back by Mr Grime, when Ms Thomson came into the room and proceeded to carry out the procedure under the guidance of Mr Grime. I was not consulted beforehand and had not given consent for someone other than Mr Grime to operate on me. Apart from saying ‘Hi’, Ms Thomson’s only comment to me was that she liked my jeans. Unfortunately, there was a problem with the procedure and I had to return to ClinicM four hours later to have the wound opened, the source of ongoing bleeding identified and cauterised and the wound re-sutured. Mr Grime did this corrective surgery. I appreciate things can go wrong, so that whilst having to go back and have the wound opened and re-sutured was unpleasant and inconvenient, this was of less concern to me than the general attitudes of both Mr Grime and Ms Thomson, which I felt to be dismissive at the least. When I returned, Ms Thomson’s only comments to me were ‘you must have bumped it’ and ‘oh, my beautiful stitches!’. Subsequently, Mr Grime volunteered that I had been given a ‘first rate service’, as he had prioritised me over another patient and that he could have left me to ‘wait for a couple of hours or even until the next day’ to deal with the problem of persistent bleeding into the wound. While Mr Grime was correcting the problem with the wound, I commented that I didn’t think there was any problem with the smaller wound, to which Mr Grime replied that there wasn’t a problem with the one he was operating on, that this was ‘normal’. I found this a rather surprising statement, given the circumstances. When I asked Mr Grime why he had not carried out the initial procedure, as I had expected, given that I was paying him privately for his skills and experience, he called Ms Thomson into the room. She was, I felt, quite combative, challenging me by saying ‘You’re not fifteen, you could have stopped the procedure at any point’. She asked me three times ‘Are you medical?’ In terms of the surgical procedure, my understanding is that for this type of invasive procedure, which would take more than 20 minutes, the use of aseptic technique is considered important. I had asked at the start of and during the procedure, if my bra should be undone so that the operation site could be cleaned properly and to give better access to the cysts to be removed. They did not feel this was necessary. There were no drapes on my back, isolating the area to be operated on, to provide an aseptic area and when I asked about this, Ms Thomson replied that they don’t use drapes as ‘they fall off’. I noted clean gloves were used, not sterile gloves. All in all, this has been an unpleasant experience and very disappointing in terms of what I would have expected of healthcare professionals. I cannot comment on the other services provided at ClinicM. However, I will not be returning to ClinicM, nor will I be recommending it.
South of England
