I was raised in Yorkshire and moved to London to start medical school at the University of London on 1993 (Guys and St Thomas’s Hospitals). It was clear early on in my training that surgery was my calling, so I constructed the rest of my training to facilitate that outcome! After working at some excellent central London teaching hospitals, I was lucky enough to win a scholarship to undertake a Doctorate of Medicine degree under the combined auspices of the Royal Marsden Hospital and the Institute of Cancer Research. I was at that point the first surgeon to have worked in the Breakthrough Breast Cancer funded lab, the lab that had discovered the BRCA 2 mutation. As you can imagine this was a huge achievement and a massive honour. My research then won a prestigious prize at the Royal College of Surgeons and I went on to present my work nationally and internationally and my work was published in international journals.
Knowing that I wanted to be a breast surgeon, my training was tailored to that end, and I was awarded a national fellowship in breast reconstruction and VERY unusually, again I was the first general surgeon at that point to win a fellowship in breast cosmetics.
Armed with all this training I now have a practice that straddles the worlds of breast health (one stops and cancer surgery) but also breast cosmetics. I enjoy both sides of my career immensely and find them both rewarding for different reasons.
”I am a national trainer in oncoplastics the specialty where plastics meets breast cancer, so I am grateful to have an extensive skill set for whoever walks into my clinic.
I am part of a busy NHS practice and treat breast cancer at my private Brentwood breast clinic also.
As one of the first general surgeons to gain an aesthetic fellowship I receive, with another similarly trained colleague a number of cosmetic referrals to our NHS practice.
We will always try and apply for cosmetic breast surgery through NHS Channels if appropriate, but the issue of whether the CCG grants funding or deems the case worthy is out of our control.
I work purely on breasts, no other parts of the body so I understand them well and focus on nothing else.
