Personal Profile
Mr Jamie McKenzie is a Consultant Orthopaedic Surgeon at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital. Areas of special interest include ankle replacement surgery and minimally invasive surgery of the foot and ankle. He also has expertise in treating young adult foot problems including sport and dance injuries.
Mr McKenzie qualified from Oxford University Medical School in 1997 with Medical and Surgical degrees and an honours degree in Physiological Sciences. During his early medical career Mr McKenzie gained a broad experience, doing basic surgical training in London and a year providing emergency surgical care in Kenya before completing higher Orthopaedic training in and around Bath. He has undertaken advanced fellowship training in New Zealand and in Bristol studying both children’s and adult’s complex foot and ankle surgery. Mr McKenzie is a senior academy teacher for University of Birmingham medical students, is involved in postgraduate education and has research interests in ankle replacement, Achilles tendinitis and hind-foot endoscopy (keyhole surgery). He has presented papers in Europe and taught on international courses.
As well as working at Bath Clinic he works at and train doctors at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital as well as other specialist hospitals in Birmingham. Ankle replacements are becoming more popular, and much work is being put into their design so he has presented and taught at international meetings on ankle replacements, and continues to train colleagues in complex ankle replacement techniques at the ROH.
From your consultation with Mr McKenzie, patients can be confident that they will get an expert opinion from someone who wants them to get better whether that means an operation, information, or reassurance. Often he will be able to reassure patients and sometimes just understanding the problem and looking through x-rays or scans together can help patients manage a problem themselves. He is often told by patients that they are grateful that someone has taken the time to explain the problem to them, which comes from his belief that patients need to know as much as they want about their illness so that they can make informed decisions.
As part of his assessment, Mr McKenzie may collaborate with other medics including orthopaedic surgeons, rheumatologists, sports med consultants, neurologists, vascular surgeons, and dermatologists. Specialists in vascular assessment and even menopause specialists will often help my patients get the most from his care.
If surgery is required, most patients will be able to go home the same day. He will use local anaesthetic blocks to improve pain relief and encourages an early active range of motion exercises.
Mr McKenzie was brought up in Africa, in a place where everyone seemed to get things stuck in their feet, so he will say that he was destined to be a surgeon as he was always the one in the family to remove splinters from people’s feet and patch up people’s wounds. He did a lot of running at school and university, managing to get an Oxford Blue for his efforts. Through his understanding of what sport and exercise means to people, the importance of mobility for independence and the benefits of being active, his aim is to keep people on their feet and as active as possible, or at least as comfortable with as much independence and dignity as possible. He is aware that his operations are often only a small part of a patient’s journey to better health so he will try to encourage patients along their path to well-being with kindness, humility, and a wealth of experience.
