Saving Faces are sad to hear of the passing of Professor Bob Woodwards, Consultant Oral and Maxillofacial surgeon.
Professor Woodwards was a friend of Saving Faces Chief Executive, Professor Iain Hutchison, and was President of British Association of Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeons (BAOMS) in 2011.
Our thoughts are with his wife Claire during this challenging time. May he rest in peace.
Photo courtesy of BAOMS
Mr Atheer Ujam is a Oral Maxillofacial Consultant who undertook his PhD at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. Mr Ujam focused his project on “Cartilage Engineering from Autologous Fat for Oro-Facial Deformity Reconstruction – Focus on the Nose.” Saving Faces part-funded Mr Ujam’s PhD.
This project aimed to engineer a cartilage-like product that could be inserted into paediatric patients with nasal deformity as a result of tumour resection, post traumatic or congenital deformity. This novel product would reconstruct normal function and aesthetics of the nose by utilizing stem cell technology to generate missing nasal cartilage, and could replace current surgical techniques that use costochondral rib grafts to replace missing or deformed nasal cartilage. 3D printing technology was used to fabricate the nasal product.
Mr Ujam PhD thesis can be found here.
Update 12/12/2023 – We hope everyone who attended our Christmas Carols enjoyed the event at the St Bartholomew the Great, West Smithfield yesterday. Thank you to Chelsea Opera Group for providing the beautiful music and thank you Jon Snow for the festive readings.
We are back with our annual Carols at Christmas concert on Monday 11th December 2023 at the beautiful Saint Bartholomew the Great in London.
The service will commence at 6.30pm. This will be a great chance to meet up with friends and other supporters, many of whom are patients and their families. This is also our way to say thank you to all our supporters for their continued support of our important work.
Click here to view the full invitation and donation form. If you would like to make a donation, please print and return the form to info@savingfaces.co.uk or by post to: Saving Faces, 71 Tonbridge Street, London, WC1H 9DZ.
Bus: The 17, 45, 46, 63, 8, 25, 56, 4, 153, 242, 521, 100, 243 and 341 buses are all within walking distance of the church.
Tube: Barbican or Farringdon (Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines) / St Paul’s (Central line)
Elizabeth Line (Crossrail): The Farringdon Elizabeth Line Station has an exit called “Barbican” in Long Lane, West Smithfield.
Parking: The nearest car parks are in Beech Street (under the Barbican) and West Smithfield.
The event is free but spaces are limited (250 attendees). Please RSVP with our friendly team at info@savingfaces.co.uk or ring 07487 235 438 / 020 3417 7757.
Original post can be found here.
The findings of the Selective Elective Neck Dissection (SEND study) funded by Elliott Bernerd, Robbie and Lisa Tchenguiz in memory of their mother Violet, Cancer Research UK, and Saving Faces, was published in the British Journal of Cancer.
Professor Hutchison comments on the appalling events happening in Iran of Iranian forces shooting at the faces and genitals of female protesters.
Read full article here – https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2022/dec/08/iranian-forces-shooting-at-faces-and-genitals-of-female-protesters-medics-say
We are back with our annual Carols at Christmas concert on Tuesday 6th December 2022 at the beautiful Saint Bartholomew the Great in London.
The service will commence at 6.30pm. This will be a great chance to meet up with friends and other supporters, many of whom are patients and their families. This is also our way to say thank you to all our supporters for their continued support of our important work.
Click here to view the full invitation and donation form. If you would like to make a donation, please print and return the form to info@savingfaces.co.uk or by post to: Saving Faces, 71 Tonbridge Street, London, WC1H 9DZ.
Bus: The 17, 45, 46, 63, 8, 25, 56, 4, 153, 242, 521, 100, 243 and 341 buses are all within walking distance of the church.
Tube: Barbican or Farringdon (Circle, Metropolitan and Hammersmith & City lines) / St Paul’s (Central line)
Elizabeth Line (Crossrail): The Farringdon Elizabeth Line Station has an exit called “Barbican” in Long Lane, West Smithfield.
Parking: The nearest car parks are in Beech Street (under the Barbican) and West Smithfield.
The event is free but spaces are limited (250 attendees). Please RSVP with our friendly team at info@savingfaces.co.uk or ring 07487 235 438 / 020 3417 7757.
The UK’s surgical research charity Saving Faces and its national research centre NFORC are proud to support Professor Jag Dhanda of the Brighton Medical School and Helen Please of the Global Anaesthesia, Surgery and Obstetric Collaboration Trainee Collaboration as they launch Virtual Reality in Medicine and Surgery.
This is a world first training over 1,400 doctors from low-and middle-income countries today and over the next 4 days in real time at Brighton Medical School and Hospital how to perform life-saving surgery using virtual reality.
The use of virtual reality will immerse the doctors in the operations and dissections of how to perform life-saving surgery in African communities which are remote from major cities and hospitals.
You can listen to our Chief Executive Professor Iain Hutchison discussing VRiMS here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSatS0yabqU
qMIDS, the world’s first rapid oral cancer test, has been developed by Queen Mary University of London and an international team of researchers. It has the potential to relieve pressure on the NHS and may improve the early detection of oral cancer.
Saving Faces has supported researchers at Queen Mary University of London who have developed the world’s first PCR test for mouth cancer. The test has now been proved with patients from China, India and the UK, with the results published in the international journal, Cancers. The inventor, Dr Muy-Teck Teh, named the test the Quantitative Malignant Index Diagnosis System (qMIDS).
qMIDS diagnostic accuracy would mean that 90% of low-risk patients could be discharged from hospital to go back to their dentist or GP for review. Or they might be tested in the dentist’s surgery and only referred to secondary care if they were high risk. High-risk cases could also be detected in the pre-cancer period and treated definitively, thereby saving the patient’s life with minor surgery, better cure rates and quality of life, as well as a huge reduction in health service costs.
The test process is largely automated, removing the need for expensive pathologists. There’s also no need for invasive biopsies. The tests can be carried out on multiple sites when patients have lesions affecting large areas throughout the mouth.
Co-study lead, Professor Iain Hutchison, stated: “qMIDS dramatically improves our management of mouth cancer and its pre-cancerous state, saving lives and healthcare costs. Surgeons and dentists anywhere in the world can use this test for minimally invasive tissue samples because all it needs is a PCR machine and the technician who operates it.
“qMIDS will help us identify patients with pre-malignancies that will never transform to cancer, so they can be reassured and discharged from hospital review. Patients with high-risk premalignancy can have minor surgery to remove the lesion before it has transformed to cancer, thereby curing the patient and saving them major surgery, which in turn reduces health service costs. It is a powerful tool especially when used in conjunction with conventional histopathology assessment.”
Read full journal article here
Read news coverage here
Thank you to all our supporters and friends – old and new – who attended this year’s Christmas Carols on Wednesday 15th December 2021.
We hope everyone enjoyed the festive evening and the beautiful music provided by the Chelsea Opera Group and their Director, Lindsay Bramley.
We are very grateful to the choir and the staff at the Priory Church of St Bartholomew the Great for hosting the carols at their stunning church.
All of us at Saving Faces are immensely proud that Baroness Helena Kennedy QC has been named in the BBC 100 Women 2021
Baroness Kennedy is a Scottish barrister known for defending the rights of women and minorities and has practised criminal law for 40 years. She is director of the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, which has recently been assisting women at risk in Afghanistan.
She was principal of Mansfield College at the University of Oxford for several years and was responsible for creating the ground-breaking Bonavero Institute of Human Rights there.
Baroness Kennedy has published various books on the justice system’s impact on women and in 1997 she was made a Labour peer in the House of Lords.
“Our human rights are meaningless unless there are lawyers to argue our cases and independent judges – women as well as men – to try them.” ~ Baroness Helena Kennedy QC