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5 Chelsea and Westminster doctors in The Times ‘Top 100 Children’s Doctors’

19 December 2012

The Times ‘Britain’s Top 100 Children’s Doctors’—published by the newspaper on Saturday 15 December—includes 5 doctors from the Chelsea Children’s Hospital at Chelsea and Westminster.

The Times ‘Britain’s Top 100 Children’s Doctors’—published by the newspaper on Saturday 15 December—includes 5 doctors from the Chelsea Children’s Hospital at Chelsea and Westminster.

The doctors who made the prestigious list include:

  • Dr Ed Abrahamson—lead consultant in the increasingly popular Children’s A&E department at Chelsea and Westminster Hospital which treats more than 30,000 children every year

  • Kate Barnard—head of the largest paediatric dental team in North West London and a passionate campaigner for improving children’s oral health

  • Mr Simon Eccles—craniofacial surgeon and clinical director of the new Chelsea Children’s Hospital and a volunteer surgeon for the charity Facing the World which brings children from the developing world to the UK for life-saving treatment for disfiguring conditions

  • Professor Neena Modi—she leads Chelsea and Westminster Hospital’s pioneering neonatal medicine research unit and her pioneering research includes a study of how nutrition during pregnancy and early infancy may influence long-term health

  • Mr Munther Haddad—service director for paediatric surgery in the new Chelsea Children’s Hospital, he is a pioneer of paediatric laparoscopic (keyhole) surgery and also chairman of the Children’s Hospital Trust Fund, a charity that is raising £1.5 million to buy a hi-tech precision surgery robot called Pluto

The ‘Britain’s Top Children’s Doctors’ supplement published by The Times on Saturday 15 December also featured the story of Ali Hussein, an Iraqi teenager seriously injured in an American airstrike in 2003 when he was only 7-years-old.

Ali’s face has been rebuilt by Chelsea and Westminster surgeon Mr Niall Kirkpatrick and his team through the charity Facing the World which brings children to the UK for life-saving treatment.

Praising the work of Mr Kirkpatrick and his colleagues, The Times columnist Melanie Reid said: “If the child’s injuries became a global symbol of the awfulness of that war, then maybe his rebuilding is a metaphor of redemption for us all.

“For this we must thank the silky hands and kindly soul of Niall Kirkpatrick ... who through the auspices of the charity Facing the World has spent the past 8 years rebuilding Ali’s face. His nose and palate were reconstructed, a prosthetic eye fitted. Operation still follows operation, with steady, remarkable results. A life, a human being, is gradually being rebuilt.

“Dr Kirkpatrick would probably hate me saying it but he understands a kind of magic. ‘It’s an area where you’re working with people’s personalities. And face and personalities go together. That’s what’s always drawn me to it,’ he says.”