Training in valve disease

Experience over more than 20 years running valve clinics, giving inpatient opinions and research into valve disease before setting up specialist valve services.  Specialist competencies in auscultation from Aubrey Leatham.

Specialist valve activity

Consultant in charge of a large valve specialist clinic seeing 200 new and 1000 follow-up patients each year.  There are devolved physiologist and nurse-led components including a murmur clinic’.  

Patients seen
Moderate and severe native valve disease, post-endocarditis and post intervention, Mitral prolapse and bicuspid aortic valves, aortic pathology

Patients not seen
Mild valve disease 

Process
Weekly valve MDT and links to TAVI, mitral, aortic and ACHD MDT.  Links with all cardiac services. One-stop echo and treadmill exercise testing available.  Magnetic resonance, CT and stress and transoesophageal echocardiography need to be booked. Patient information leaflets available.

Past member of Endocarditis MDT

Founding president of the British Heart Valve Society and active in ESC heart valve council and international committees setting standards for the clinical management or imaging of native and prosthetic heart valve.

Before retirement offered inpatient specialist valve consultations 

Reviewer on valve disease for Heart, Journal of the American College of Cardiology, JACC CVI, European Heart Journal and EHJ-CVI

CPD
Attendance at annual BHVS and EuroValve meetings

Research
MD in methods of detecting early failure in prosthetic heart valves.  Subsequently organised RCTs of different designs of prosthetic valve and researched methods of improving the timing of surgery in aortic stenosis. More recently has researched better methods of service delivery.

Has published 8 books on echocardiography and medicine and 400 articles on valve disease and cardiac imaging.

Valve societies
Council of the British Heart Valve Society and Valve Disease council of the ESC

Council Position: Founding President

Professor John Chambers became a consultant cardiologist in 1991 and was appointed Professor of Clinical Cardiology at Guy’s and St Thomas’ Hospitals in 2009. His specialist interests are cardiac imaging and heart valve disease.

Cardiac Imaging – He founded the echocardiography department at Guy’s Hospital. He was involved with setting up national accreditation programmes for transthoracic and transoesophageal echocardiography and for setting up departmental accreditation, a process which subsequently extended to Europe. He was chief examiner for the British Society of Echocardiography from 1995 – 98, chair of the British Society of Echocardiography (BSE) Education Committee 1996-8 to and BSE President 2003-2005. He is an associate editor for the journal Echo Research and Practice.

Valve disease – He has a career-long interest in valve disease. His MD thesis was on the early detection of prosthetic valve dysfunction. He founded the Heart Valve Group performing randomised studies of designs of replacement valve, core lab work and studies to determine the optimal timing of surgery for aortic stenosis. He set up a specialist multidisciplinary valve clinic which is a national reference. He is clinical lead for the South East England valve disease network.

He was editor of the Journal of Heart Valve Disease from 1995-2004 and has been on the international advisory board for Heart since 2016. He was a founder member and first President of the British Heart Valve Society (2010-2013).

He is an invited expert on the International Standards Organisation (ISO) panel producing standards for testing heart valve replacements including TAVI. He is also a member of the British Standards Institute (BSI) committee on heart valves. He has been an expert witness at the FDA panel to grant a licence to the Carbomedics valve.

He has written 10 books, co-authored 40 national or international guidance documents and written over 400 papers.