Mr Woodnutt started his career as a Synthetic Organic Chemist working for the Open University.  Subsequently, he attended Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School and qualified as a doctor in 1990.  He completed his training as an Orthopaedic surgeon in south Wales with a short Fellowship in Exeter in 2000.  After starting a substantive Consultant post in Swansea in 2001, he specialised in Arthroplasty of the lower limb, especially in younger persons.  He introduced the first Surgical Assistant and Pre-Assessment in Wales shortly after starting and set up the first ring-fenced ward for arthroplasty.  This lowered the average length of stay from 14 days to (eventually) less than 3 days.  It also reduced infection rates and improved through-put for which he won an award from the Welsh Assembly in 2005.

In setting up a prospective database, research and follow-up data was collected on arthroplasty patients 10 years before the commencement of the National Joint Registry for which he later worked as a Regional Clinical Coordinator for 12 years.  He later pioneered the introduction of the Dynamic Pelvic Motion analysis for acetabular cup positioning in conjunction with Corin (UK) Ltd.  He has travelled extensively providing Orthopaedic care in Bangladesh and South Africa and was the first Orthopaedic Surgeon to visit the Islands of St Helena and Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic  By the time of leaving the NHS in 2018, he had completed nearly 9,500 procedures (including more than 1,000 revisions).  He has published and presented a large number of papers both for educational courses and international conferences and is currently a reviewer for Hip International, Bone and Joint Journal and the European Journal of Orthopaedic Surgery.

He continues to operate in a number of hospitals privately including St Joseph’s in Newport, Sancta Maria in Swansea and Werndale in Carmarthen.  His current research projects include the Mathematics of Follow-up, the outcome of Implants and wear related analysis of hips in the longer term as well as maintaining an interest in teaching junior Surgeons.