Shehan Hettiaratchy: Planning the next 10 steps

Biography

Shehan Hettiaratchy, 47, is lead surgeon and major trauma director at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London. Brought up in Hampshire, he qualified at Oxford and has served in the army as a reservist since leaving school, completing two tours in Afghanistan. Imperial’s major trauma service treated victims of the recent terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge, in which five people died and 50 were injured. It was an event long expected and scrupulously prepared for: “extraordinary in some ways, and in some ways it wasn’t,” Hettiaratchy says. “This is what the NHS does . . . all we did on that day was what we do normally.”