School Student
What's surgery like?
Mr Makani Hemadri
Associate Specialist in General Surgery
Clinical Innovation and Improvement Lead
I love to get to work because I enjoy my unique role of being a surgeon and at the same time looking at the wider system. Being an SAS surgeon is quite challenging due to the impact of narrow subspecialisation, increasing consultant numbers and shorter streamlined training. That is where my personal challenge was. The desire to innovate for the system and reinvent myself has been my story for nearly the last decade.
In that journey, I have been the Chair of the Hospital at Night project, innovated to create a single visit general surgery service for all day case surgery, reduced haemorrhoidectomy to a two hours stay procedure done under local anaesthetic, took my department and our trust ahead of the curve on VTE prophylaxis months before it became mandatory and put patients in front of surgeons to provide direct subjective feedback in anticipation of a stronger PPI (patient-public involvement) in the future.
Some of these activities won my team the local Health and Social Care Awards for service transformation in 2008. The Leaders for Change Award from the Health Foundation followed by a year as Fellow of the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement in 2008-09 resulted in broadening my outlook.
Intensive training in healthcare improvement that included the Advanced Training Program at Intermountain, Salt Lake City and Top Management Programme of the Kings Fund, has convinced me that the future of healthcare will be far better and I wish to play my small part in getting there.
I now spend a large chunk of my time on clinical patient safety, system wide healthcare quality and clinical engagement. I am a Member of the Improvement Faculty of the NHS Institute, Member of the SAS Committee of RCS England (and hence an ex-officio member of the Patients Liaison Group of RCS England), Honorary Clinical Tutor at Hull York Medical School amongst a few others. I have also recently agreed to be a Human Factors advocate/buddy for the Clinical Human Factors Group.
My top tip for being a successful surgeon and a person is team work. I believe that hard work and persistence is rewarding. I feel that there will always be obstacles to what we want to achieve if we see them as obstacles; the so-called insurmountable obstacles and failures are merely pointers for us to reprioritise and aim for something higher.
My true reward of course is the smile that I get from patients and colleagues in professional life and from my family in private life.
