Dr Felicity Mehendale

Surgeon, Scientist and Broadcaster

She has led the teams that provide the East of Scotland Cleft Lip and Palate Service for over 13 years and combines her clinical work with research at the University of Edinburgh. She most frequently operates on babies and children with cleft lip and palate, but also operates on adults. She first “meets” many of her little patients at an antenatal 20 week scan. She also treats children with a variety of other birth (congenital) conditions that affect the face, speech and the airway.

Her research includes surgical outcome studies, why clefts happen, 3D imaging of the face, the mechanics of human speech.

Broadcast Experience

Felicity loves clinical work and research, but equally, loves sharing her fascination with medicine and the human body, with others. She is passionate about demystifying medical science and making accessible, relevant and fascinating to everyone. Her ability to engage and enthuse viewers of all ages was demonstrated when her explanation of how our faces form in the womb, in BBC documentary “Countdown to Life”, was selected for Gogglebox and the Christmas Day episode of Gogglesprogs.

TV Experience

• Countdown to Life – The Nine Months that Made You. BBC Science Sept 2015
• Gogglebox, Sept 2015
• Christmas day episode Gogglesprogs, Dec 2015
• Highland Midwives – BBC Alba (to add details)
• Highland Midwives – the follow up BBC Alba (to add details)
• Documentary on Paediatric Retrievals – BBC Alba, Autumn 2014
• Debating Matters, The Referendum Schools Debate (contributor – Judge) STV Tx  April 2014
• Keeping Britain Alive (contributor) Garden Productions, Amy Flannagan (this showed a very brief clip of her carrying out an endoscopy on a child).

Radio

• Scar free wound healing Good Morning Scotland 19/07/2016
• Women’s Hour – debating with another plastic surgeon about cosmetic surgery. 2013
• Interview on Good Morning Scotland on cleft lip and palate research, 2013
• Interview for BBC Scotland Medical Matters on scarring, burns and wound healing

The Early Days – growing up in India

Felicity grew up in a very medical household; her father was a plastic surgeon and her mother a plastic surgery theatre sister. Home was filled with innumerable scientific experiments and inventions including new surgical instruments. She was fascinated by her father’s medical photograph collection, 3d plaster casts of faces and stories of patients.

She wanted to be a surgeon from a very young age (although rescuing stray animals in India, made her also want to be a vet, but she couldn’t bear the thought of not being able to speak with and reassure animal patients). She will never forget watching her first ever operation – when her father created a nose out of a piece of forehead skin…and she has been fascinated by the science and the art of plastic surgery, ever since.

She thinks the human body is endlessly fascinating, but equally, thinks humans and human medicine have so much to learn from other species in the animal kingdom; and that medicine has so much to learn from other fields.

International Medicine and Healthcare/A Global Perspective

Felicity trained as a doctor on a very rigorous medical course at Bombay University and worked as a general surgeon, in India, where she treated a huge range of conditions from tropical diseases, to stab wounds, to birth conditions as well as patients with cancer, at one of the leading international cancer hospitals.

She then moved to the UK and specialised as a plastic surgeon. Driven to answer fundamental questions about why humans scar, she won a research grant from the Wellcome Trust to carry out research into how embryos heal wounds without scarring, in the developmental biology lab at University College London. She then worked as a Cleft Fellow at Great Ormond Street Hospital.

She has been awarded research fellowships or funding from the Wellcome Trust, the Royal College of Surgeons of England and the Craniofacial Society of Great Britain and Ireland.

She has published numerous research and clinical papers in peer reviewed academic journals; and has received a number of academic awards (including the Hallett Prize from Royal College of Surgeons and the Ian McGregor Medal from BAPRAS). She is the only person to have received the Craniofacial Society of Great Britain and Ireland’s research medal twice; and was awarded the best All-round medical student in her year of 200 students in Bombay University.