Meet Mr Naveen Cavale - BFIRST Chair
22 April 2025
Tell us about yourself!
I’ve been a consultant for 15 years now ,graduated and trained in London, I have an NHS practice at King’s College and Guy’s & St. Thomas’, and private practice in Battersea. I am in my 3rd year as chair of BFIRST, and I also am patron to KCL Med School’s Plastics Society - one of my passions is teaching and training - both resident and med students.
Tell us about your time with BFIRST?
Started with my involvement in Gaza, I originally went with 2 other charities (IDEALS and MAP), and we were seeing up a joint project with BFIRST, but the recent war intervened, so I have not been back since 2023. I am now involved with 2 new projects with BFIRST - Tanzania, and Guyana, these are growing nicely.
Why did you want to work with BFIRST?
BFIRST is ALL about teaching and training - we are not here to provide ’service’ ie we don’t just arrive in a country and operate on lots of people. Rather, we ‘wait to be invited’, and arrive as ‘guests’, to help local teams learn more as well as do more (capacity building). We are also not about equipment provision, as we simply do not have the funds to provide expensive kit. But we have a huge human resource in the form of UK plastic surgeons (members of BAPRAS, mainly), so we are a people charity, first and foremost!
What are your aspirations for BFIRST?
I don’t want BFIRST to be ‘just about the surgeons’ - we have focussed on consultants to date, and we have seen a great increase in involvement from trainees and med students - this is great, but we also need to involve, nurses, allied health professionals (eg therapists), as well as the other backbones of any decent healthcare system, such as administrators, managers and so forth - so I hope to involve people like this who also help run busy plastic surgery services in the UK.
What do you like to do outside of work and BFIRST?
I travel a lot - I am now a board member of ISAPS (the international aesthetics society), and this is a great way to meet interesting people, learn things that are not done at home, and make new friends. I cycle a lot at home, like fiddling with gadgetry e.g. vintage keyboards is my latest obsession. I also have a family, who are very good at tolerating me!