Under Her Skin

When three bombs tore out the heart of Bali and decimated so many Australian lives in 2002, burns surgeon Professor Fiona Wood led her team to save twenty-eight survivors with up to ninety-two per cent body burns. A pioneer in the field of burns and reconstructive surgery, she made world headlines with the use of her ground-breaking invention of 'spray-on skin' to help minimise her patients' horrific scars. Fiona was later made Australian of the Year, was voted Australia's Most Trusted Person for an unprecedented six years' running in the annual Reader's Digest poll and has been acclaimed as an 'Australian Living Treasure'. This is now the story of her extraordinary life, from the daughter of a fifth-generation coal-mining family in the north of England to becoming one of Australia's most innovative, respected and dedicated surgeons and researchers. She talks candidly of the moving valour of her burns patients, the heartbreak, the triumph, the tears and the controversies that have stalked her stellar career. As co-founder of the Fiona Wood Foundation, she conducts vital research into all aspects of the survival of burns victims, with findings and breakthroughs that have had an impact on treatment around the globe., while she is also director of the Burns Service of Western Australia, a consultant plastic surgeon at Fiona Stanley Hospital and Perth Children's Hospital and Winthrop professor in the School of Surgery at The University of Western Australia. Remarkably she has achieved all of this while raising six children.