Dr Kieran Hirpara,
Specialist Orthopaedic Surgeon

Dr Kieran Hirpara is a Specialist Orthopaedic Surgeon with a clinical focus on the shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand, and subspecialty fellowships in shoulder surgery and hand surgery. He took his medical degree at the University of Galway in 2002, became a Member of the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh in 2006, and was awarded a research MD from the University of Galway in 2011. He completed higher orthopaedic training across the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland scheme between 2008 and 2014 — six years across Mayo, Waterford, Cappagh, Crumlin, Beaumont, the Mater Misericordiae University Hospital in Dublin and Galway University Hospitals — finishing with the TIG Advanced Training Post in Hand Surgery (an ortho-plastic hand fellowship) at Wythenshawe and Salford in Manchester, under Prof V Lees, Mr Z Naqui and Mr L Muir. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons (Trauma & Orthopaedics) in 2012.

Two further shoulder fellowships followed in Brisbane. The first — twelve months at the Brisbane Hand & Upper Limb Clinic as Ass. Prof Cutbush's inaugural shoulder fellow, with Prof Ross and Dr Duke as co-supervisors — covering shoulder arthroplasty, arthroscopy and instability surgery, with microvascular call alongside. The second was a sports shoulder fellowship at St Andrew's War Memorial and The Prince Charles Hospitals, with Drs MacGroarty and Rimmington.

He took up his public appointment as an Orthopaedic Surgeon at Rockhampton Base Hospital in 2016, was elected a Fellow of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 2020, and in the same year established CQ Hand + Upper Limb at the Mater Private Hospital Rockhampton — where he now offers complex shoulder, elbow, wrist and hand surgery to patients across Central Queensland.

His research output centres on flexor tendon repair biomechanics, including the ex-vivo barbed-device work published in the Journal of Bone & Joint Surgery. His twenty-five peer-reviewed papers and a 2015 Springer chapter on shoulder anatomy span hand, wrist and shoulder surgery, with continuing interests in tendon-repair biomechanics, distal radius outcomes, and arthroscopic shoulder reconstruction. He has reviewed for Frontiers in Orthopaedic Surgery (Frontiers Media / Nature) since 2014.

Beyond the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons and the Australian Orthopaedic Association, Dr Hirpara is a member of subspecialty peer societies in Australia and the United Kingdom — see professional memberships for the colleges and societies that scrutinise practice after training is done, and what each requires of its members.