Mr James Ball

Biography

James Ball is a leading consultant ophthalmic surgeon, specialising in laser eye surgery and cataract surgery. He has been operating at consultant level for twenty years and has performed over 10,000 procedures. He has been voted by his peers to be one of the top cataract surgeons in the UK.

Mr Ball undertook specialist fellowship training in cataract and refractive surgery at the Lions Eye Institute in Perth, WA and Moorfields Eye Hospital in London. He then worked as an NHS Consultant at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust from 2005 to 2021. During that time, he co-founded an NHS laser eye surgery service which provides LASIK and SMILE to private patients and therapeutic treatment to NHS patients. Through this facility, Mr Ball provided training to a generation of eye surgeons.

In 2013 he was one of the first surgeons in the UK to perform SMILE laser eye surgery (lenticule extraction) and he is a recognised expert in the procedure.

In 2017, Mr Ball founded his own private clinic – Custom Vision Clinic – on the Bowcliffe Hall Estate in North Yorkshire. The clinic’s success led to Custom Vision becoming part of the Optegra family of clinics in 2024. Following this acquisition, Mr Ball is proud to be an Optegra Ambassador Surgeon, providing vision correction to Optegra patients.

What first attracted James Ball to a career in ophthalmology?

“The impact eye surgery can have on improving a person’s quality of life is astonishing. I saw this for the first time when I was a medical student at Cambridge. I was sitting in on an eye clinic when a professor of Egyptology attended for a routine follow-up and brought along the book he had just written, which he had dedicated to his eye surgeon and the team at Addenbrookes. They’d saved the sight in his only eye and so he’d been able to continue working and writing and could see his grandchildren.”

GMC Number: ‍4259523

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