SAMANTHA TROSS

At the age of seven, after having witnessed the passing of several elder family members, Samantha announced to her father that she was going to be a surgeon, a firm decision that never wavered. A naturally bright child, Samantha enjoyed school and excelled academically. At eleven years old, due to her father taking up a post in Zambia via the Commonwealth Secretariat, Samantha emigrated from Guyana to England where she spent most of her secondary education at boarding school in Hertfordshire and Nottinghamshire. Samantha found boarding school to be isolating sometimes and lonely which helped prepare her for a career in medicine.

In 1987 she went on to attend the University College and Middlesex School of Medicine. It was during this time that Samantha found herself drawn to orthopaedics as the surgeons were the most welcoming.

It was also in orthopaedics that Samantha encountered her first female surgeon, an experience that made her think, ‘if she can do it, I can do it too.’

After receiving two prestigious fellowships in Sydney and Toronto, and lots of hard work, Samantha eventually became a hip and knee specialist and the first Black female Surgical Consultant in the UK. The variety of the patients – old, young, male, female and coupled with their quick recovery times –is what she enjoys most about orthopaedics. Confident that ‘we have yet to see the best of her’, Samantha would like to give back to Guyana by helping the country to establish more affordable surgical procedures. Samantha also wants to follow up on an outreach programme she completed when she travelled into the interior of Guyana to treat Guyanese Native American Indian children.