Francisco del Piñal is a hand surgeon from Santander, Spain, and an internationally recognised authority in hand and wrist surgery. After training and working in Australia and the United States, he returned to Spain to found the Instituto de Cirugía Plástica y de la Mano, with clinics in Madrid and Santander.
His work covers microsurgical toe-to-hand transfer, the reconstruction of the severely injured hand and the arthroscopic treatment of wrist fractures. He was one of the pioneers of wrist arthroscopy in the 1990s and developed several techniques, including dry arthroscopy. His thumb reconstruction techniques received the award for the best paper of 2019 in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery. In recent years he has focused on surgery for nerve paralysis and chronic pain, including complex regional pain syndrome.
He has served as president and secretary general of the European Wrist Arthroscopy Society (now the International Wrist Arthroscopy Society, IWAS) and was president of the 2016 FESSH Congress in Santander. He has given some 900 scientific lectures worldwide and is the author of the Atlas of Distal Radius Fractures.
