Dr Kevin Tetsworth

Dr Tetsworth is a highly accomplished and internationally recognised orthopaedic surgeon whose specialty interests and experience have evolved continuously over the course of the past 35 years. He completed his medical school and orthopaedic training in Chicago, and it was his good fortune to then complete advanced post graduate fellowships directly under two of the world’s most highly respected sub-specialty experts, under Dr Dror Paley and Dr George Cierny.

Dr Tetsworth practiced initially in Baltimore for almost 10 years but has been working in Queensland for the past 20 years, and he has been clinically active and qualified as a consultant surgeon for almost 30 years.

His depth of knowledge and level of experience allows him to successfully care for infections, non-unions, and deformities that many others would consider very difficult, if not impossible, to treat. Internationally recognised as an expert in a number of different areas within orthopaedic surgery, Dr Tetsworth routinely handles tertiary and quaternary referrals that address complicated, diverse pathology. For the past decade his focus has been almost exclusively on complex, difficult patients’ other surgeons are reluctant to treat, and he is only rarely involved in routine cases of any kind. He has treated well over 2,000 cases of chronic infection, and in these difficult cases has a tremendously high documented rate of success. He has lengthened more than a thousand limbs using Ilizarov’s methods of distraction osteogenesis; he has vast experience using external fixation since 1990, and alternatively telescopic lengthening nails since 1994. Dr Tetsworth has successfully treated hundreds of cases of post-traumatic segmental bone loss using many methods, including bone transport (6 different techniques), acute shortening/lengthening, and the Masquelet induced membrane technique, perhaps the most experience in Australia and a number few surgeons in the world could approach. He has highly developed skills and expertise to address the most complex types of limb salvage and reconstruction, the management of high-energy trauma, pelvis and acetabular fractures, deformity correction, limb lengthening, the surgical treatment of osteomyelitis, prosthetic joint infections, corrective osteotomies, revision joint arthroplasty, minimally invasive plating for humeral shaft fractures, 3D printing and modelling, custom implant design, Ilizarov methods, and more. His research interests span an equally broad range, with active projects involving implant development, intra-articular fractures, stem cells, gene expression in fracture healing, the biology of the Masquelet induced membrane, statistical shape modelling, tissue engineering, identifying molecular markers for infection, and more.

Dr Tetsworth has previously served as the President of ASAMI-BR, the international society devoted to limb lengthening and deformity correction, as well as currently serving as the President of the Australian Limb Lengthening and Reconstruction Society. He also volunteered as a member of the International Committee for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons for four years. He has been very active academically as well as clinically, with over 180 publications, including one book, 16 book chapters, and more than 100 peer-reviewed papers. Popular as an invited speaker and widely recognised internationally as an expert in many different areas of orthopaedic surgery, Dr Tetsworth has delivered over 750 lectures in 28 different countries on 6 continents during his career, educating thousands of other orthopaedic surgeons around the world.