Dr Bheena Vyjhallaja

Dundee

It started outside Malaysia. She left for school in Singapore on an ASEAN scholarship, then went to Scotland and took her medical degree at the University of Dundee, qualifying in 2011. She stayed in Britain for everything that came after it. That matters less as a piece of biography than as a fact about the shape of her training: it is one system, followed the whole way through, rather than a qualification from one country topped up in another.

The UK specialist programme

British specialist training in obstetrics and gynaecology runs for years, in numbered stages, in hospitals, with assessments the whole way along and examinations sat while working full time. She passed the membership examinations of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in 2017. They come in three parts: the sciences underneath the specialty, the clinical knowledge, and a third part that examines how a doctor actually conducts a consultation.

She was a registrar at Kingston Hospital, and then a specialist senior registrar at King’s College Hospital in London, where she completed the advanced training module in subfertility and reproductive medicine. The Certificate of Completion of Training came in November 2022. It is the document that says a doctor has finished the whole programme and can go onto the UK specialist register.

Fertility as the subject

Finishing specialist training makes a doctor a consultant in obstetrics and gynaecology, which is a wide field. What narrowed it was the work that came next. She spent the eighteen months after her CCT as a fertility doctor at the St Helier Assisted Conception Unit, doing IVF and assisted reproduction day in and day out, and in August 2023 was awarded the European Fellowship in Reproductive Medicine.

The fellowship is a subspecialty qualification in fertility, accredited jointly by ESHRE and EBCOG, earned in accredited fertility units against a curriculum set across Europe rather than in any one country. Alongside it she completed the British Fertility Society modules in intrauterine insemination and embryo transfer, assisted reproductive technology, reproductive medicine ultrasound, and the management of the infertile couple.

From April 2024 until she came home she was Clinical Lead and Consultant at The Fertility Home in Wales, which is also where she took her diploma in medical education. She arrives in Malaysia new to this hospital. She does not arrive new to running a fertility service.

Complex obstetrics

Her training also carries a good deal of complex obstetric experience, which is to say the difficult end of pregnancy and birth: high-risk pregnancy, complex caesarean section, instrumental delivery. That is not what this practice is about and it is not what she is advertising. It is worth knowing about for one reason only: a fertility doctor who has spent years managing pregnancies that went wrong reads a scan, a history and a risk differently from one who has not.

Teaching

She holds a postgraduate diploma in medical education from the University of South Wales, completed in February 2024. Most doctors who explain things well are good at it by temperament. She went and studied it, formally, as a subject.

That is the reason a consultation with her tends to run longer than people expect, and the reason this website is written the way it is. If you leave an appointment able to explain to somebody else what is happening to you and why, the appointment worked.