A VETERAN tennis player is back on court thanks to pioneering knee surgery carried out in Basingstoke.

The osteotomy, where bone from the donor bank is used to realign the injured leg, helped 62-year-old Peter Childs, and was carried out at BMI Hampshire Clinic in Old Basing.

As reported in The Gazette, orthopaedic surgeon Adrian Wilson has been at the forefront of osteotomies for years.

The technique involves cutting into the shin bone, before opening it to create a wedge. The surgeon then realigns the leg to take the pressure off the injured area.

Traditionally the wedge would be held with a plate until it had time to heal in the same way a fracture would.

But this often resulted in pain for the patient, because blood could leak from the gap into the leg.

Mr Wilson has come up with a way of filling the gap – by using bone from a donor bank at Basingstoke hospital, cut to fit exactly into the space, and it goes on to heal like normal bone, dramatically reducing the patient’s recovery time.

The new technique, called precision wedges, uses bone taken from the ball at the top of a hip joint, removed from patients undergoing a hip replacement.

It takes Mr Wilson around 45 minutes to complete.

Mr Wilson said: “It acts like a cork in a bottle, preventing bleeding [for] less swelling and a much quicker recovery.

“The patients are now routinely experiencing minimal pain immediately after their operation and are usually able to go home the next day.

“I have performed this procedure on 46 patients in the last year and in 25 per cent of cases they report no pain at all.

“What’s really exciting is we are spearheading something that will become as well-known as knee replacement.”

Mr Wilson said other surgeons would have offered Mr Childs a full or partial knee replacement, which would have curtailed his tennis playing.

But he said there is still a long way to go before the rest of the country, and world, catches up with Basingstoke.

Currently, only 1,000 osteotomy operations are carried out in the UK, compared to 20,000 in Germany.

And of those, one third are performed by Mr Wilson’s team.

Mr Childs, who has played tennis at county, national and international level, said: “I really did think this could be it for competitive playing but just weeks after the operation I was amazed at how quickly I was recovering.”