ProfessorDavid Watters

David Watters is Alfred Deakin Professor of Surgery at Deakin University in Geelong, Victoria, Australia, based at the University Hospital Geelong. He specialises in general, colorectal and endocrine surgery but is also actively engaged in advocating for global surgery in Low- and Middle-Income countries. During his career he spent almost 20 years in developing countries including Papua New Guinea (Professor of Surgery, 1992-2000), Hong Kong (1991), Zambia (1985-90) and South Africa (1982-84).
Recently he was appointed to the role of Director of Surgery at Safer Care Victoria (SCV) in July 2022 (2022-2024) to lead a Perioperative Learning Health Network within their Centres of Clinical Excellence Program and to support the Victorian Department of Health's Surgical Recovery and Reform Program (also 2022-2024). He is committed to improving perioperative care before, during and after surgery and working with all the disciplines involved across the whole patient journey. He has just completed a three-year term as Chair of the inaugural Victorian Perioperative Consultative Council (2019 -2022) and still provides support and advice to the Council through his role at SCV. During the COVID-19 pandemic he led Victoria's perioperative repsonse (2020 - 2022).
He is a Past President of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons (2015- 2016), having spent nine years on their Council from 2007. He has been Professor of Surgery for Barwon Health and the University Hospital Geelong since 2000, initially with the University of Melbourne (2000-2010), before Deakin University opened its own Graduate Medical School in Western Victoria (2011-).
He is an Edinburgh University graduate, and in addition to the FRACS, a fellow of the Edinburgh, Hong Kong, and East Central and Southern Africa Colleges of Surgeons, a Life Member of the Medical Society of Papua New Guinea (2017) and Honorary Member of the Asian Surgical Association (2015). His research interests, in addition to global health, include surgical audit and performance, surgical outcomes, perioperative mortality, and surgical history. Since the CoVID-19 pandemic, he has chaired the Victorian Post Acute COVID-19 Sequelae (VPACS) research group and was a co-convenor of Australia's first long covid conference, held in Victoria on 1/9/2023. He has some 250 peer reviewed publications and book chapters, has published 6 books, four on Clinical Care in the Tropics and two on Surgical History: Stitches in Time - Two centuries of Surgery in Papua New Guinea (Xlibris, 2012) and Anzac Surgeons of Gallipoli (RACS 2015). He gave the Guthrie Lecture to the British Society of History of Medicine in 2017 on "Daring to dream of equal opportunity in Medicine." He gave the biennial Archibald Watson lecture [RACS/RACP] in 2014 at the RACS ASC on the early Medical History of Fiji and the Doctors who worked in its then capital of Levuka during the 1870's.
In recognition of his contribution to surgery and surgical training in PNG he was awarded an OBE (2012). Within the Order of Australia, he was awarded the AM for “significant service to Medicine and Medical Education and Leadership Roles with Professional Organisations” (2018 Queen’s Birthday Honours.) Deakin University appointed him the title of Alfred Deakin (now to be Distinguished) Professor in August 2016. He is a Rotary Paul Harris Fellow (Port Moresby, 2000), on the Editorial Board for the World Journal of Surgery, and a Senior Editor for the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Surgery. [Updated May 2024]