Dr. Andrew Yam Kean Tuck is a hand surgeon who specializes in the management of hand and wrist disorders and injuries. Over the course of his career, Dr. Yam has received various awards for his health service quality and teaching excellence.
Prior to private practice, Dr. Yam was appointed Director of the Peripheral Nerve and Paralytic Upper Limb Service at Singapore General Hospital (SGH) from 2009 to 2012, and Associate Program Director of the SingHealth Residency Program for Hand Surgery from 2011 to 2012. He continues to provide advice and surgical assistance to his colleagues at Singapore General Hospital in managing patients with complex nerve and brachial plexus injuries.
Dr. Yam obtained his medical degree from Flinders University in Adelaide, South Australia in 1997. He became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 2003 and obtained his Master of Medicine in Surgery from the National University of Singapore (NUS) in 2004. He received training in Hand Surgery at SGH and National University Hospital and was accredited as a Specialist in Hand Surgery in 2007.
Dr. Yam completed a Higher Medical Development Program fellowship in Peripheral Nerve and Brachial Plexus Surgery at the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital in London, the premier center of excellence for nerve surgery in the U.K. He was also trained in the surgical management of cerebral palsy, tetraplegia and brachial plexus reconstruction at other internationally renowned centers.
Apart from clinical work, Dr. Yam is also active in research work and has published more than 40 scientific articles and book chapters, covering a wide spectrum of hand and nerve disorders in international journals and textbooks. He has also conducted and mentored several research projects that have won awards at the Singapore Society for Hand Surgery Annual Scientific Meetings.
Dr. Yam is also active in academia, where he teaches and promotes peripheral nerve surgery and reconstructive surgery for paralytic upper limb conditions in various developing countries. To date, he has given lectures and demonstrated live surgeries in Indonesia, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Dubai and Cambodia.
From 2015 to 2019, Dr. Yam was the lead surgical tutor in an international collaboration where surgeons from the U.K. and Singapore came together to train Cambodian surgeons in hand surgery and brachial plexus and paralytic upper limb surgery at Children’s Surgical Center (CSC), a non-government charity hospital in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. The success of this project has established CSC as the de facto national center for brachial plexus surgery in Cambodia.
Dr. Yam's specialty interests are birth brachial plexus palsy reconstruction, brachial plexus injuries reconstruction, functional reconstruction of weak or spastic upper limbs, management of hand and wrist disorders and injuries, minimally invasive nerve decompression surgery, peripheral nerve injury repair and functional reconstruction and thoracic outlet syndrome decompression.
