Mr Alex Chipperfield

My name's Alex Chipperfield. I'm a Consultant Orthopaedic surgeon here at Benenden Hospital and I specialise in hip and knee replacement surgery. I went to medical school in London and I trained in London and the south east of England before taking a fellowship over in Sydney, Australia in lower limb arthroplasty. Since 2010, I've been a Consultant Orthopaedic surgeon here in Kent, working in the NHS in East Kent hospitals and privately at Benenden and other private hospitals in the area.

I chose orthopaedics, especially hip and knee surgery because it is a practical subject. It's something that you can do to help improve people's lives. The impact that a worn out joint has on someone's life, the way it shrinks their world and limits them is quite distressing sometimes and being able to reverse that, to open up horizons and to give people their life back and allow them to get back on their feet again, is a very satisfying thing to do.

My approach to patient care is to try and be a human being about things. A lot of the time medicine is hidden behind complicated words, phrases, sayings and looking at pictures, looking at scans and people tend to forget that essentially, you know, two human beings having a conversation about things. So I try and minimise the amount of medical jargon I use, I talk to people like they're humans. I give them time to answer their questions and I listen to what they have to say and try and make the best decision together.

Benenden Hospital is a great place to work. It's a new, modern, clean, airy environment. It's small enough that there's still that human touch. A lot of big institutions can be fairly anonymous. At Benenden you can pick up the phone and speak to someone, speak to a human being straight away and there's a good group of surgeons who work here. In fact, the whole team is great. We've got leading anaesthetists. We've got modern operating theatres, we've got all the imaging facilities that we need. We've got helpful caring nurses. We've got driven physios, everything about every aspect of patient care. From the minute you step through the door is second to none.

Well, I've got two girls and a dog. So I spend a lot of my time chasing all three of those around. I also like to keep fit and active. I swim. I cycle. At the moment, I'm doing a lot of running. I'm training for a marathon in three weeks' time, which will be my fifth marathon. And, yeah, although I'm not a natural runner, I find that the discipline of training and the mental strength you need to get through that kind of thing. I find that I enjoy the challenge.