Pioneering A&E consultant bows out from St Mary’s - Robin Touquet treated 7/7 attack victims

Professor Robin Touquet, who was 64 on Tuesday, cared for victims of the Paddington rail crash in 1999 and the July 7 bombings during his career in the National Health Service.
 

He said: “Now is a good time – the right time – for me to leave ‘this field of battle’. 

“I am a Westminster boy, a Mary’s man and an Imperial professor, with 46 years in medicine. 

“I am a very lucky man.”
 

Prof Touquet recalled taking charge of triage on the ambulance ramp as July 7 victims flooded in from Edgware Road tube station, adding: “It was a whole hospital response and our A&E’s military discipline palpably paid off.”
 

He is best known in the hospital for a revolutionary system that has helped reduced alcohol-related attendance at A&E.

For every two patients who test positive and accept an appointment with one of St Mary’s alcohol health workers, there is one less alcohol-related attendance to A&E.
 

Prof Touquet said: “Drinking excessively makes people vulnerable, for example to muggings and date rape. This work is common sense, medically and humanitarianly, and is being rolled out across the UK. It is opportunistic intervention to encourage patients to develop insight into their drinking and to contemplate change.”
 

Prof Touquet qualified in 1971 at Westminster Hospital Medical School.
 

He served on general duties for the Royal Marines Reserve and medical division of the Royal Naval Reserve. 

He started work at St Mary’s in July 1986 as the hospital’s first ever trained A&E consultant, as previously the work had been done by orthopaedic surgeons.
 

Prof Touquet said: “I was fresh, fit and enthusiastic. I focused on teaching, coining our motto, ‘scientia vincit timorem’ – knowledge conquers fear.”
 

He recalled a particularly rough Notting Hill Carnival “when the milk bottles were stolen to make Molotov cocktails”.

One of the professor’s passions was teaching junior doctors who worked with him in St Mary’s Hospital A&E, training 50 individual A&E medical teams, each for six months, between 1986 and 2011.
 

“I appointed, I taught, I moulded, I battle-hardened those A&E teams.
“They are our pride and joy – in them we foster excellence and loyalty,” he added.