Biography

Amir Hamid is a highly experienced refractive surgeon performing laser eye surgery, refractive lens exchange (with premium lenses) and cataract surgery. He is Optegra’s Clinical Lead for Vision Correction, a range of treatments to help people live a life free of spectacles and contact lenses.

To date, he has performed over 10,000 cataract and laser refractive surgeries (including more than 1,500 SMILE procedures) and routinely performs up to 60 procedures each week, with excellent clinical outcomes.

He was appointed Consultant Ophthalmic Surgeon in 2011 with a special interest in cataract surgery, corneal transplantation and the correction of presbyopia (age-related need for reading glasses). He is also Optegra’s Medical Director with responsibility for day-to-day clinical governance and Optegra Eye Sciences research division, to ensure patients receive the highest standards of care.

In 2012 Mr Hamid received the Certification in Laser Refractive Surgery by the Royal College of Ophthalmologists (CertLRS). He is exceptionally skilled in performing SMILE, Presbyond, LASIK and LASEK laser vision correction procedures as well as the use of the most advanced multifocal intraocular lenses.

Additionally, he is certified in the use of the Artisan Iris Clip lenses and the Staar Visian ICL, ideal for patients unsuitable for laser vision correction. Improving patient outcomes is fundamental to his practice and so he is involved in the evaluation of new intraocular lenses prior to market launch, teaching surgeons how to perform laser vision correction, refractive lens exchange or refractive cataract surgery.

He is regularly invited to speak and teach at national and international vision correction conferences. In addition he is a highly acclaimed clinical investigator, always at the forefront of new refractive treatments
and technologies. He regularly presents his published scientific articles and papers at the cataract and surgery conferences in the UK, Europe and US and is a manuscript reviewer for the British Medical Journal.

Personal profile

Mr Hamid was born in Malaysia and lived there until 1992. He now lives in London with his wife and young family. He enjoys snow sports, holidays in historic cities and warm beaches; he loves cooking and baking all types of foods, especially the Malaysian way of not wasting anything which has led to some unusual combinations!

What first attracted Amir Hamid to ophthalmology?

That you can actually make things better for people. A lot of the time in medicine, when you treat someone, you are improving their life in terms of getting rid of a disease but not necessarily making them better than before they became ill. But in ophthalmology, we can improve their sight to a stage where they are better than they were, even before developing the problem. It can be life-changing for our patients.

Watch – BBC interview of Mr Amir Hamid