Vicky Evans: forensic physician who set the standard of care for treatment of victims of sexual assault
Vicky Evans played a leading role in developing the discipline of forensic medicine as an academic specialty, establishing a training programme as well as professional standards and competencies: elements that were missing when she began working as a police surgeon, as forensic physicians were known when her career began in the 1980s. She was also instrumental in establishing standards of care for those who had been sexually assaulted, as one of the first four female physicians to be recruited to St Mary’s Sexual Assault Referral Centre (SARC) in Manchester in 1986. The centre—the first in the UK and only the second in the world after Perth, Western Australia—was founded by GP Raine Roberts and heralded a revolution in the treatment of those making allegations of rape or sexual assault. Before this, treatment was patchy. Victims would be seen in police stations, sometimes with the perpetrator of the assault in the next room. Assessing doctors had little training and were more often tha
