Professor Stephen Westaby FRCS (born 27 July 1948) is a British heart surgeon at

John Radcliffe Hospital The John Radcliffe Hospital (informally known as the JR) is a large tertiary teaching hospital in Oxford, England. It forms part of the Oxford University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and is named after John Radcliffe, an 18th-century physici ...

Oxford Oxford () is a city in England. It is the county town and only city of Oxfordshire. In 2020, its population was estimated at 151,584. It is north-west of London, south-east of Birmingham and north-east of Bristol. The city is home to the ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. He won the award of Midlander of the Year in 2002.

Early life

Westaby was raised on a council estate in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire. In his autobiography, ''Fragile Lives'', he claims inspiration for his career aspirations partly from watching the

BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC #REDIRECT BBC Here i going to introduce about the best teacher of my life b BALAJI sir. He is the precious gift that I got befor 2yrs . How has helped and thought all the concept and made my success in the 10th board ex ...

medical documentary ''

Your Life In Their Hands ''Your Life in Their Hands'' is a long-running BBC TV documentary series on the subject of surgery, examining surgical practice from the point of view of both surgeons and patients. Its first run was produced by Bill Duncalf and Mary Adams, co ...

'' on the family's black and white television, and the harrowing first-hand perspective he had of his grandfather's deteriorating and subsequently fatal heart failure. He attended Henderson Avenue Junior School and

Scunthorpe Grammar School The St Lawrence Academy (formerly High Ridge School) is a coeducational Church of England secondary school with academy status, in Scunthorpe, North Lincolnshire, England. The Academy teaches GCSEs and BTECs, and has specialisms in sports and ...

(now The St Lawrence Academy). He went to

Charing Cross Hospital Medical School Charing Cross Hospital Medical School (CXHMS) is the oldest of the constituent medical schools of Imperial College School of Medicine. Charing Cross remains a hospital on the forefront of medicine; in recent times pioneering the clinical use of ...

. He has claimed to have 'never been a straight-A student' and attributes his success in surgery primarily down to his manual dexterity, ambidexterity and ability to draw – traits he claims to have had from an early age.

Career

Westaby and his team performed

Peter Houghton Peter Houghton (20 August 1938 – 25 November 2007) was the longest surviving artificial heart transplant patient in the UK. Houghton was implanted with a Jarvik 2000 heart pump at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford, England, by professor Steph ...

's heart operation in June 2000, implanting a Jarvik 7 artificial left ventricular assist device, a turbine pump. Peter Houghton (1938–2007) became the longest living person with an electrical heart pump in the world. His memoir of his career as a heart surgeon, ''Fragile Lives: A Heart Surgeon’s Stories of Life and Death on the Operating Table'', was published in 2017 by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Cor ...

. The book was shortlisted for the 2017

Costa Book Awards The Costa Book Awards were a set of annual literary awards recognising English-language books by writers based in UK and Ireland. Originally named the Whitbread Book Awards from 1971 to 2005 after its first sponsor, the Whitbread company, then ...

Biography Award and won the 2017 BMA president's choice award. A second memoir, ''The Knife's Edge: The Heart and Mind of a Cardiac Surgeon'', was published by HarperCollins in 2019.

Personal life

He is married with one son and one daughter.

References

1948 births 21st-century English medical doctors Alumni of Charing Cross Medical School British cardiac surgeons Fellows of the Royal College of Surgeons of England Living people People from Scunthorpe Physicians of the John Radcliffe Hospital {{UK-med-bio-stub