A former Boston Grammar School pupil has returned to his roots to work at the town’s hospital as a consultant.
Interventional cardiology consultant Dinal Taleyratne works across two hospital sites, Pilgrim Hospital, Boston three days a week and two days a week at Lincoln County Hospital for United Lincolnshire Hospitals NHS Trust.
Speaking about returning to the county Dinal said: “I grew up in Boston and love the area and friendly atmosphere. ULHT provides a very high quality service. What I enjoy about Boston is that the hospital is large enough to provide a wide range of services to the public but small enough that relationships between staff are not impersonal. All the consultants know each other and that makes it much easier and more enjoyable to work together.
“It’s really exciting to be a new consultant in Boston because I have the opportunity to plan and implement that change. We’re looking at different ways of following up patients, improving our inpatient service and introducing new clinics to make waiting times shorter.”
He runs two to three clinics per week at Pilgrim for patients who mainly have chronic diseases, treats acutely unwell patients admitted to the Acute Cardiac Unit and also provides cardiology opinions for patients who are referred for specialist advice.
Dinal was born in Sri Lanka and his family moved to Boston when he was five years old. He attended St Mary’s Primary School and then moved on to Boston Grammar School. Following this he studied at Cambridge University for six years. His father is also a doctor and has worked at Pilgrim Hospital for around 30 years.
During his training he worked in various hospitals around the UK including Cambridge, Bedford, Cheltenham and Gloucester but did his cardiology training in the Nottingham Deanery. Following his training, Dinal wanted to ensure his skills were at an optimum level and spent a year doing an interventional fellowship at the CK Hui Heart Institute in Edmonton, Canada.
He said: “I carried out over 700 percutaneous coronary intervention procedures during the year in Canada. This makes me one of the highest volume operators in the world last year. My patients can be confident that I have carried out this procedure well over a thousand times.”
The 35-year-old started at ULHT as a locum consultant but has recently signed his permanent contract with the Trust.
· Percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), commonly known as coronary angioplasty or simply angioplasty, is a non-surgical procedure used to treat the stenotic (narrowed) coronary arteries of the heart found in coronary heart disease.