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The Otago Boys' High School Foundation

PO Box 11,
Dunedin, New Zealand

Tel +64 3 477 2546
Fax +64 3 477 5468

Queens Birthday Honours - Emeritus Professor Alastair Rothwell

05/06/2006

Alastair Rothwell (1957-58) has been awarded the ONZM (Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit) for services to musculoskeletal medicine in today’s Queen’s Birthday honours. Emeritus Professor Rothwell spent his final two years of secondary education at Otago Boys’ before studying medicine at Otago University, graduating and then practicing in the city. After completing research at Oxford University on a Commonwealth Fellowship, he returned to Dunedin in 1973 before heading to Christchurch and the newly-created department of orthopaedics at the university’s Christchurch School of Medicine almost a decade later. In 1997, Professor Rothwell was instrumental in setting up a national joint replacement register, which allowed the recording of the success or otherwise of operations, the longevity of joints, surgery complications and operation numbers. Information about more than 70,000 operations is now contained in the register with the knowledge gained allowing almost double the number of operations and associated funding. Since 1982 Professor Rothwell has been a member of the Burwood Upper Limb Research Group, which assists in the restoration of hand functions to tetraplegics, and is also a senior examiner for the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons. He is a past-president of the New Zealand Orthopaedic Association and has been a member of the association’s education committee and chairman of the International Federation of Societies for Surgery of the Hand spinal cord injury committee.