Dr John Garvey is a General Surgeon with training at Royal Prince Alfred Hospital and St Vincent’s Hospital in Sydney. He is a Bachelor of Medicine and Bachelor of Surgery graduate of the University of New South Wales and a Bachelor of Science (Med) of UNSW. He undertook postgraduate research training in the Nuffield Department of Surgery at the University of Oxford between 1977 and 1980 and wrote his D Phil (PhD) thesis on the topic of Foetal Pancreas Transplantation in the Rat. He passed the examinations for Fellowship of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeons in 1986 and spent 3 years as Senior Registrar in surgery at Prince Henry Hospital and the Canterbury Hospital in Sydney before entering specialist practice in 1990. Shortly after entering practice, he became aware of a previously unreported injury in football players that came to be known as Sports hernia and subsequently Groin Disruption Injury. He accumulated 100 cases over the next 10 years and published and reported them at General Surgeons of Australia conference in Surfers Paradise in 1999 and at the International Hernia Society meeting in London in 2003. Subsequently he presented papers on this groin injury work in Beijing, San Francisco, Edinburgh, Singapore, Berlin, Istanbul et cetera. His interest in injury assessments came directly from experience with groin injuries in football players when he realised that the same injury that occurs in sports players occurs in injured workers.

Dr Garvey spends about half his time with sports people and half his time with injured workers. He assesses the digestive tract by digestive tract endoscopy at Central Sydney Private Hospital and has been a Visiting Medical Officer at Central Sydney Private Hospital (formerly known as Sussex Day Surgery) continuously for over 25 years. In addition to groin injury reconstruction and digestive tract endoscopy, he regularly performs other day surgery procedure such as circumcision, vasectomy, haemorrhoidectomy and banding, removal of soft tissue abnormalities such as lipomas and cysts et cetera.