Changing Faces, Changing Lives
Cleft Surgical Fellowship
Project Title
Cleft Surgical Fellowship
Location
South West Cleft Service, Bristol, United Kingdom.
Inaugural 2026 Fellow
Dr Andrew Stirrup
FRCSGlasg (OMFS)
At a Glance
The Craniofacial Australia Cleft Surgical Fellowship provides advanced specialist training in cleft lip and palate surgery at the South West Cleft Service in Bristol, United Kingdom.
Working within one of the UK’s leading multidisciplinary cleft services, the Fellow gains extensive surgical experience, learns alongside specialists across the entire cleft care pathway, and contributes to internationally recognised research through the University of Bristol’s Cleft Collective.
By investing in specialist training today, we’re helping develop the expertise that will strengthen cleft care for children and families into the future.
About the Fellowship
Cleft care is complex and can extend from infancy well into adulthood. Achieving the best possible outcomes requires not only highly skilled surgery, but close collaboration between surgeons, speech and language therapists, orthodontists, specialist nurses, psychologists, audiologists and other health professionals.
The Craniofacial Australia Cleft Surgical Fellowship was established to help develop the next generation of surgeons with the specialist skills and experience required to provide this care.
Based at the South West Cleft Service in Bristol, the Fellowship combines hands-on surgical training, structured mentorship and multidisciplinary clinical experience. The Fellow is exposed to procedures across the cleft treatment pathway, including primary cleft lip and palate repair, alveolar bone grafting, secondary cleft rhinoplasty, orthognathic surgery and complex revision procedures.
Importantly, the Fellowship extends beyond the operating theatre. Working alongside the broader cleft team gives the Fellow an understanding of how surgical decisions intersect with speech, orthodontics, psychology and long-term development, helping build a genuinely multidisciplinary approach to care.
The Fellowship also provides access to the Cleft Collective at the University of Bristol, one of the world’s largest cleft research programmes. This creates opportunities to contribute to research investigating treatment outcomes, child development and the genetic and environmental factors associated with cleft lip and palate.
For Craniofacial Australia, this Fellowship is an investment with a long horizon: developing specialist expertise today that can influence the care of children and families for decades to come.
Dr Andrew Stirrup
2026 Cleft Surgical Fellow
An Oral and Maxillofacial Surgeon with a strong commitment to cleft care, Andrew has deliberately shaped his career towards this specialised area of surgery. He is particularly drawn to cleft care because of the difference that coordinated multidisciplinary treatment can make to a person’s function, appearance, communication and quality of life.
During the Fellowship, Andrew hopes to deepen both his technical surgical skills and his understanding of the clinical pathways that support children and families throughout their cleft journey. He is particularly interested in Bristol’s advanced speech investigation clinic and its integrated fluoroscopy and nasendoscopy systems, which allow specialists across different locations to work together in real time and help identify when intervention may be required.
Andrew also hopes to build lasting links with the Cleft Collective Research Group, contributing to collaborative research capable of answering some of the more challenging questions in cleft care.
Anticipated Outcomes
The impact of the Fellowship is designed to extend well beyond Andrew’s time in Bristol.
Through intensive clinical training, multidisciplinary experience and participation in research, the Fellowship aims to:
- Develop highly specialised surgical expertise across the cleft treatment pathway.
- Strengthen multidisciplinary cleft care, with a deeper understanding of how surgery, speech, orthodontics and other specialties work together to improve outcomes.
- Support evidence-based practice by connecting clinical training with internationally recognised cleft research.
- Build international collaboration, creating relationships between clinicians and researchers that can continue long after the Fellowship is completed.
- Develop future leaders in cleft care who can pass their knowledge and expertise to others.
- Improve long-term care for people born with cleft lip and/or palate, by investing in the skills, knowledge and research that will shape treatment into the future.
Andrew describes the Fellowship as providing the dedicated training and foundation he needs to become a cleft surgeon and ultimately take up a position within a specialist cleft service. He also hopes to remain involved in collaborative research, helping generate high-quality clinical evidence that can inform cleft care internationally.
This is what investment in education can achieve: expertise developed through one Fellowship can benefit patients, strengthen research and be shared with colleagues throughout an entire surgical career.
