CAROLYNNE JANE VAIZEY was educated at Cape Town University and then trained in General and Trauma Surgery up to Consultant level in Johannesburg. She was a Houseman at Baragwanath Hospital in Soweto, the third largest hospital in the world, and then did a year in the Trauma Unit at the Johannesburg General Hospital before becoming the first female surgical trainee to do the training rotation at the Johannesburg General Hospital. She got her South African Surgical Exit examination - FSC(SA) in 1991 and then did 9 months as a Consultant Surgeon in Johannesburg.
She went back to England in 1992 to work as a Colorectal Surgical Fellow in a District General Hospital and took the UK surgical exit examinations – FRCS(Gen). She then took up a research post at St Mark’s Hospital to obtain an MD through the University of London. This was on the assessment and treatment of patients with faecal incontinence. As part of her thesis, she was the second surgeon in the world to use sacral nerve stimulation for patients with faecal incontinence and rapidly expanded the indications for this therapy.
At the beginning of 1998 she became a Consultant Colorectal Surgeon at the Middlesex & University College Hospitals in Central London and Honorary Senior Lecturer at University College London. In 2003 she took up a new post as Consultant Surgeon at St Mark’s Hospital, The National Bowel Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer at Imperial College. She is now Co-Divisional Director at St Mark’s.
Miss Vaizey has particular interests in the management of intestinal failure and surgical disasters, severe Crohn’s, faecal incontinence, anal surgery and functional bowel disease. She is the Lead Surgeon for Intestinal Failure in the Lennard Jones Intestinal Failure Unit at St Mark’s and Director of the Sir Alan Park’s Physiology Unit. She has written 22 book chapters on her specialty interests and has 175 papers and editorials published in Peer reviewed journals.
She was the founding Chair of the European Society of Coloproctology’s Guidelines Committee and a previous member of their Executive and Research committees. This year she has been awarded honorary membership of the ESCP. She is the Chair of the IF sub-committee for ACPGBI and Chair-in-waiting and Scientific Program Director for The Pelvic Floor Society in the UK.