Robert Geoffrey Chaytor | The BMJ

Robert Geoffrey Chaytor (“Geoffrey”) qualified from the medical school, King’s College, Newcastle, when it was still part of Durham University. He served in the Royal Army Medical Corps for three years in Burma, Egypt, Palestine, and Sudan. After training as an ear, nose, and throat (ENT) surgeon he was appointed consultant in 1952 and opened the new Walkergate Hospital in Newcastle. This had been a fever hospital for the area and occupied a large site, on which it was intended that the third main general hospital for Newcastle was to be built. After work had progressed for several years in this respect, it was realised that the ground could not hold such a huge building because of mine works underneath, and a new site was necessary for the proposed hospital. Eventually this was found and the Freeman Hospital was built on it. When the ENT unit at Walkergate was amalgamated with the other two units in Newcastle, Geoffrey felt it was time to take retirement in 1982. His interest was in the assessment of hearing difficulties in babies and young children.

In pre-NHS days, babies who were born with severe hearing difficulties would be unable to learn to speak, even though they were of normal intelligence. This wasn’t understood, and they were left institutionalised in psychiatric hospitals, having been misdiagnosed with mental illness. Geoffrey was one of a handful of consultants in the UK who tested hearing and fitted hearing aids in this group. These consultants lobbied the government to objectively test the hearing of infants and children. Eventually the Department of Health issued a white paper, making it the requirement of local authorities to discover children with hearing difficulties and educate these children fully. Geoffrey made it his work to educate health visitors on how to assess hearing and advocated for deaf children to be educated in mainstream schools with help from hearing aids and peripatetic teachers. Eventually, those health visitors became audiometrists, a new NHS role. He set up a regional centre for this that eventually became integrated into the child development centre at the Royal Victoria Infirmary, Newcastle, inaugurated by Donald Court. Geoffrey was a founding member of the British Society of Audiology.

In retirement he was able to extend a lifelong interest in photography, particularly in natural history, in which he gave illustrated talks over seven decades. He retired to Allendale, in the foothills of the north Pennines, and took an active part in the running of St Cuthbert’s Church. Althea “Mac,” his wife of 53 years, and their son, Robin, predeceased him. Geoffrey leaves a daughter, Lesley; four grandchildren; and six great grandchildren.