Dr Poh Seng Yew

Dr Poh Seng Yew is a senior orthopaedic and sports surgeon at Mount Elizabeth Hospital, Singapore.

He specialises in hip, knee and shoulder surgery. In addition, Dr Poh also does complex knee arthroscopy, osteotomy, multi-ligamentous ligament reconstruction, meniscal reconstruction, cartilage resurfacing, complex shoulder arthroscopy, open shoulder reconstruction and shoulder arthroplasty.

Dr Poh previously served as director of sports service in the department of orthopaedic Surgery at Singapore General Hospital (SGH) and chief of the sports and exercise medicine service at SGH and SingHealth Duke-NUS Sport & Exercise Medicine Centre. He currently serves as a visiting senior consultant at SGH, Sengkang General Hospital and KK Women’s and Children’s Hospital. He has more than 18 years of clinical experience.

He obtained his basic medical degree from the National University of Singapore (NUS), where he won several academic awards including the Dean’s List. He went on to obtain his Master’s degree from NUS, and was appointed a member of the Royal College of Surgeons in Edinburgh, UK, and later, a fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, UK, in orthopaedic surgery.

He received the Health Manpower Development Plan award to pursue specialty training in hip surgery and sports medicine in Orthopädische Chirurgie München in Germany for a year under one of the pioneers in hip arthroscopy in Europe. In addition, he has undergone hospital visitations in the USA, Germany, Italy, Japan and Taiwan to learn the latest techniques in shoulder and elbow surgery, hip arthroscopy, osteotomy, and hip and knee arthroplasty.

Dr Poh has a special interest in hip preservation surgery, being the earliest fully fellowship trained surgeon in this area in Singapore. He established the SingHealth joint hip preservation service, with the aim to optimise the care of hip patients across all SingHealth hospitals. Hip preservation focuses on interventions to treat hip disease by preserving the native hip joint and delaying or preventing hip arthritis and the need for hip replacement. These include techniques such as hip arthroscopy, open surgical dislocation and peri-acetabular osteotomy.

He introduced arthroscopic hip labral reconstruction, arthroscopic assisted femoral head and neck fracture fixation, peritrochanteric endoscopy, and endoscopic hip abductor repair in Southeast Asia. He also introduced vascularised fibula grafting for avascular necrosis of the hip in Singapore.

Dr Poh has been invited as regional and international faculty, and is active in training surgeons from around Asia through fellowship and visitation programmes in orthopaedic sports medicine and hip preservation surgery. He is one of the highest volume hip arthroscopy surgeons in Southeast Asia, having performed over 500 such procedures to date.

He also has experience in orthopaedic trauma. He is currently the community development officer for the AOTrauma Singapore’s council. He has been invited as international faculty to the AOTrauma courses in Davos, and regional faculty to the AOTrauma courses in Asia-Pacific.

Dr Poh holds concurrent positions as adjunct assistant professor in the department of orthopaedic surgery at NUS Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, adjunct assistant professor at Duke-NUS Medical School, and adjunct teaching faculty at Lee Kong Chian School of Medicine, Nanyang Technological University.

He was also the clinical core faculty for the SingHealth orthopaedic residency programme, and clinical physician faculty for the SingHealth surgery-in-general residency programme. He serves as a member of the JCST examination committee for orthopaedic surgery appointed by the Ministry of Health. He has also served as orthopaedic surgery examiner for several examinations.