About

MY BACKGROUND

I was appointed as a Consultant Plastic Surgeon and Honorary Senior Lecturer in Plastic Surgery at St James’s University Hospital in Leeds in 1999.

In 1977 at the age of 14, I watched a short video played by a surgeon visiting the school I attended. The video demonstrated how the surgeon took the patient’s deformed, twisted and useless leg, and through carefully planned bone repositioning straightened the limb, giving the child a chance of learning to walk. This experience later influenced me into choosing a reconstructive surgical career.

My goals were reflected in my training. I started at my current unit in Leeds which is the one of the largest microsurgical units in the world.

The weekend on-call brought in a steady stream of patients requiring basic limb repair, whilst the position of St James’s as a regional and national centre for microsurgery, brought in patients suffering from severe limb and life-threatening injuries. I started to learn the techniques involved.

My training took me to Aberdeen for two and a half years at a time when farming and the oil industry were booming. Both these generated severely injured patients with a disturbing regularity. Again I learnt a great deal about tissue structure, salvage and reconstruction.

In 1998 I succeeded in securing a fellowship at the Christine Kleinert Institute for Hand and Microsurgery in Louisville, Kentucky. This unit is internationally renowned for microsurgical training and has produced many microsurgeons across the globe.

 

Here I was privileged to work with Harold Kleinert who is world renowned for his work on tendon injuries as well as other members of that faculty who are world leaders in their respective fields.

This was a unit that did not turn injured patients away regardless of their ability to pay and as a result the work was intensive. It was here in Louisville that I experienced at first hand the surgical management of children affected by cerebral palsy in their upper limbs.

Not long after this the opportunity arose to join a unit in which I could apply the training that I had embarked on in 1989.

In November 1999 I took up post as a consultant plastic surgeon in Leeds. Here I carried out the usual range of general plastic surgery but also developed specialisation in reconstruction for limb paralysis and spasticity, microsurgery and childrens’ hand surgery.