Ajit Abraham Consultant Hepato-pancreato-biliary ( HPB) and Trauma Surgeon and Deputy Chief Medical Officer

About me

Ajit is a Quality Improvement Fellow and Consultant Hepato-pancreato-biliary (HPB) Surgeon at Barts and the London NHS Trust (BLT).

BLT is one of the largest acute care hospitals in the UK. Ajit works as part of a team that delivers elective, tertiary HPB surgical care for the populations of North East London and Essex.

He also provides emergency general and trauma surgery care on call. In addition to being the Clinical Lead for Digestive Surgery, the Quality and Safety Lead for Digestive Diseases, and the Surgical Audit and Governance lead at BLT, Ajit is an Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Queen Mary University London and a faculty member at the NHS Institute of Innovation and Improvement. 

Ajit spent his early childhood years in Ghana where he was born, did his first few years of school in Manchester and later went on to complete high school plus his first two degrees in medicine and general surgery in India. He then moved to London where he completed his subspeciality training in HPB surgery and liver transplantation.

Ajit has had a longstanding interest and engagement in quality improvement and safety in surgery. During his year in Boston, his major area of focus will be the development of a deeper understanding of the application of operations research methods to the problems related to surgical flow and variability, and surgical reliability.

Given his first-hand experience of the impact of bottlenecks and service saturations on the care pathways for emergency and elective surgical patients, in addition to gaining an adequate foundation in the application of these methods, he looked forward to becoming involved in IHI’s various patient flow initiatives. He also hoped to identify best practices at IHI-affiliated institutions in the United States where such models are being applied successfully in surgical contexts, with a view to applying similar strategies at BLT on his return to London. 

Ajit also hoped to be able to translate some of the other successful quality and safety related strategies currently being implemented at such institutions in the United States into the context of his own organisation, in his quality improvement advisory role.