Dr Balwinder Bajaj, Consultant Cardiologist

Dr Balwinder Bajaj

BSc (Hons), MBBS, PhD Molecular Pharmacology, MSc Medical Education

Consultant Physician and Cardiologist

Dr Balwinder Bajaj is a Consultant Physician and Cardiologist at HMT Sancta Maria Hospital in Swansea, where he has practised since 2003. He has been a consultant for more than twenty years, and his sub-specialty interest is cardiac imaging. He is Associate Clinical Professor in Pharmacology at Swansea University Medical School and Assistant Medical Director for Education and Training at Swansea Bay University Health Board.

Heart symptoms are difficult to sit with. Chest discomfort, breathlessness that was not there last year, a heartbeat that has started announcing itself. Some of it matters a great deal and some of it does not, and the only way to tell is to have it looked at properly. Modern cardiac imaging means that can now often be done without anything invasive, and usually within days rather than months.

About Dr Bajaj

Dr Bajaj graduated with a BSc with honours and MBBS from St George’s Hospital Medical School, University of London, in 1987. He went on to complete a PhD in Molecular Pharmacology at the University of Leeds and an MSc in Medical Education at Cardiff University.

He has practised as a Consultant Physician and Cardiologist for more than twenty years, and has worked at HMT Sancta Maria Hospital since 2003. He is an Honorary Consultant Cardiologist with Swansea Bay University Health Board, based at Singleton Hospital.

His sub-specialty interest is cardiac imaging, the non-invasive techniques used to look at the heart and coronary arteries in detail, including CT coronary angiography and myocardial perfusion imaging. Alongside his cardiology practice he continues to work as a general physician, which means he is equally comfortable with the problems that turn out not to be cardiac.

Medical education is the other strand of his career. He was Associate Clinical Professor in Pharmacology at Swansea University Medical School from 2006, working on teaching, curriculum design and course management for both the Medicine and Physician Associate programmes, and he has been Assistant Medical Director for Education and Training at Swansea Bay University Health Board since 2018. His PhD in molecular pharmacology underpins that work, and it gives him an unusually detailed grounding in how cardiac medication actually works.