Mr Donald Sammut

Mr Donald Sammut’s specialist expertise are: repair and reconstruction of hands following trauma or degeneration, arthritis, nerve and tendon surgery, and the reanimation of the paralysed hand.

He regularly treats hand conditions in musicians as well as in professional sportspeople, particularly rowers (the British Olympic team)

He is an anatomist, and since 1995 has created, organised and taught on an Anatomy Cadaveric dissection course which has run continuously since, and has become a staple of Hand Surgery training in the UK and Europe. He has also been extensively involved in the training and examination of hand surgeons in Britain and across Europe.

He founded the UK Charity, Working Hands, a group set up for visiting hand surgeons to reconstruct and reanimate paralysed hands in patients with leprosy and teach local surgeons initially in India, latterly in Nepal.

Since 2003, has been in full time private practice.

In 1980, he qualified as a doctor from Charing Cross Hospital, University of London, and trained first as a general surgeon in London and Bedford, before training in Plastic Surgery, in London, Liverpool, Salisbury, Billericay and Manchester in the UK and in Strasbourg, Paris and Barcelona in Europe.

His higher training included hand fellowships with specialists in Strasbourg (Guy Foucher), London (David Evans), and Barcelona (Marc Garcia Elias), with an additional fellowship in craniofacial and aesthetic surgery in Paris (Daniel Marchac).

In 1993, he was appointed Consultant Hand and Plastic Surgeon in Bristol.

As lead Hand clinician, he established the Hand Unit at Frenchay Hospital, Bristol and the Congenital Hand Unit at the Bristol Children’s Hospital and ran these services between 1993 and 2003. Between 1999 -2009, he was also Congenital Hand surgeon at the Humanitas Hospital, Milan, Italy.

Since 1999, he has founded, and has run, surgical programmes in leprosy hospitals in India and latterly, in Nepal. He travels there once a year, leading a team of UK surgeons, teaching and mentoring Nepali surgeons and operating on patients with leprosy and with extensive scarring from burns.

In 2026 he was awarded ‘Giant of Hand Surgery’ by the European Federation of Hand Surgery Societies.

He is an artist, a life member of the Chelsea Arts Club, and his work has been exhibited in London. He illustrates medical and non-medical works.