Council member for South Central England

Henk Giele trained in Perth, Western Australia, and at the Bernard O’Brien Institute of Microsurgery (Microsurgery Masters), with fellowships in Paris and Oxford. For 25 years he’s been a consultant at the Radcliffe Hospitals and Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre, Oxford.

Henk’s interests are:

• Microsurgery
• OrthoPlastics (microsurgical musculoskeletal reconstruction after trauma, infection, and sarcoma)
• Hand surgery (congenital upper limb anomalies, brachial plexus and peripheral nerve conditions, trauma and degenerative conditions).
• Transplantation (vascularised composite allografts). Henk has performed over 66 VCA transplants (27 abdominal wall, 40 sentinel forearm flaps and 1 facial nerve/neck composite. Oxford and Leeds are contracted by NHSE to provide hand transplantation in the UK.
• Innovation. Developing new operative procedures for common problems or for unique situations, some of which have been adopted internationally.

His research interests are surgical innovation, upper limb surgery, improving islet transplantation, ex-vivo flap perfusion and transplantation of composite vascularized tissue. He is currently funded by JP Moulton Charitable Foundation and NIHR EME.

He is a specialist advisor to the new technology assessment committee, and a NHS Clinical Entrepreneur. He has ex-editor for Journal of Hand Surgery (European) and deputy ex-editor of JPRAS. Henk Giele has published over 130 peer-reviewed articles, 24 book chapters and two editions of the Oxford Handbook of Plastic Reconstructive Surgery.

Henk is an enthusiastic teacher in UK and abroad. His current charitable focus is Ethiopia supported by BFIRST and CURE.