Mr Donald Sammut

Mr Donald Sammut’s specialist expertise are repair and reconstruction of hands following trauma or degeneration, arthritis, nerve and tendon surgery, and the reanimation of the paralysed hand.

He regularly treats hand conditions in musicians as well as in professional sportspeople, particularly rowers (including the British Olympic team) and rugby players.

He teaches anatomy at the University of Bristol Medical School; was honorary senior lecturer in anatomy at King’s College, London for 10 years; and frequently lecturers nationally and internationally. He has also been extensively involved in the training and examination of hand surgeons in Britain and across Europe.

He founded the UK Charity, Working Hands, a group set up for visiting hand surgeons to reconstruct and reanimate paralysed hands in patients with leprosy and teach local surgeons in Nepal and India.

Mr Donald Sammut (FRCS Plast, FRCS Eng)is a consultant hand surgeon who, since 2003, has been in full time private practice.

In 1980, he qualified as a doctor from Charing Cross Hospital, University of London, and trained first as a general surgeon in London and Bedford, before training in plastic surgery, in London, Liverpool, Salisbury, Billericay and Manchester.

His higher training included hand fellowships with specialists in Strasbourg (Guy Foucher), London (David Evans), and Barcelona (Marc Garcia Elias), with an additional fellowship in craniofacial and aesthetic surgery in Paris (Daniel Marchac).

In 1993, he was appointed consultant hand surgeon at Frenchay Hospital in Bristol and he has, since then, specialised exclusively in hand surgery. He is particularly well known for reconstruction of the hand after trauma and paralysis.

As lead clinician, he established the Hand Unit at Frenchay Hospital, Bristol and the Congenital Hand Unit at the Bristol Children’s Hospital and ran these services between 1993 and 2003. Between 1999 -2009, he was also a congenital hand surgeon at the Humanitas Hospital, Milan, Italy.

Since 1999, he has founded, and has run, surgical programmes in leprosy hospitals in India and latterly, in Nepal. He travels there twice a year, leading a team of UK surgeons, teaching and mentoring Nepali surgeons and operating on patients with leprosy and with extensive scarring from burns.You can watch a short documentary on this project below.

He is an artist, a member of the Chelsea Arts Club, and his work has been exhibited in London. He also illustrates medical and non-medical works.