Personal Profile
Ms Uppal’s NHS practice is based at St Thomas’ Hospital in London where she is the Clinical Lead for the Hand Surgery Department and Lead for the Day Surgery Unit. She is committed to improving safety and outcomes following surgery and as such, has pioneered a new ‘Wide Awake Surgery’ service for Hand Surgery. This has improved the safety of many operations, which are now mainly performed under local anaesthetic instead of general anaesthetic.
Ms Uppal graduated with first class honours in New Zealand in 2001. After completing her Plastic Surgery training programme in London, she continued to train in subspecialty areas in fellowships. These included training in orthopaedic and plastic complex trauma reconstruction and hand surgery at the Royal Centre for Defence Medicine, paediatric hand surgery at Great Ormond St Hospital and aesthetic surgery at the Wellington Hospital. After obtaining Fellowship status at the Royal College of Surgeons, she also was awarded the European Board of Hand Surgery Diploma. She became a consultant in 2014.
Ms Uppal is passionate about training the next generation of surgeons and has set up the first Hand Fellowship for Plastic Surgeons in London. She is the Course Director for the Advanced Hand and Wrist Cadaveric Dissection Course and teaches at the Royal College of Surgeons, the Royal Society of Medicine and she is on the faculty of several plastic surgery cadaveric courses. She also organises and teaches on specialist training courses for Hand Therapists and General Practitioners. She sits on the interview panel for National Selection for plastic surgery trainees.
She has many publications in peer reviewed journals, including book chapters, and has presented her work internationally.
