I want to make difficult surgery easier to understand.

I remember trying to figure out much of surgery for myself. The learning curve was steep. Over time, I began to understand that difficult operations become more manageable when the principles behind each manoeuvre are made explicit.

Those principles include how tissue should behave, what the eye is telling you, when a familiar step no longer fits, and how to change course without losing sight of the surgical objective. They are practical lessons built across many cases, and some are not described clearly in textbooks.

Learning how to teach surgery

Teaching residents and fellows has helped me recognise the mistakes that recur most often, why they happen and where deliberate practice can make the learning process more efficient. It has also forced me to explain decisions that experienced surgeons may otherwise make almost instinctively.

Inside Eye Surgery is my attempt to make that operating-room judgement visible: what the surgeon sees, what changes the next move, and why a technically correct step can still be wrong for a particular eye. I hope this helps flatten the learning curve for surgeons and trainees beyond my own operating theatre.

What patient care has taught me

Refractive cataract care has taught me that a technically successful operation is only one part of a good result. Lens choice, the plan for spectacle independence, the quality of the conversation before surgery and the management of expectations all shape how a patient experiences the outcome. Some of what works best in practice is not easily found in a textbook.

I also see patients seeking second opinions after difficult outcomes. Some complications are unavoidable. Others show where earlier recognition, better planning or a timely change of strategy might have altered the course. These cases reinforce why careful thinking before and during surgery matters.

For residents and fellows

Fellowship applications are competitive, but fellowship can be immensely rewarding. As one of the faculty involved in teaching fellows at SNEC, I find that trainees gain more from advanced training when their foundations are already secure. Textbooks remain essential; this site adds short, practical notes drawn from the questions and advice that arise in daily teaching.

I completed undergraduate medical training at the National University of Singapore and postgraduate ophthalmology training in SingHealth. My qualifications include MBBS, MMed (Ophth), MRCSEd and FRCOphth. Alongside my clinical and teaching work, I serve as Chief Medical Informatics Officer at SNEC.