Dr Benjamin Teo completed his specialist qualifications in the areas of Acute, General, and Geriatric Medicine with the Royal Australasian College of Physicians (FRACP), before completing further specialist pain medicine training as a fellow of the Faculty of Pain Medicine of the Australian and New Zealand College of Anaesthetists (FFPMANZCA) at the Prince of Wales Hospital, Randwick in Sydney.
In 2023 he also completed all 3 Category Endorsement requirements with the Faculty of Pain Medicine’s Procedural Endorsement Program (PEP) in Pain Medicine Procedures under the mentorship of Dr James Yu and A/Prof Khor in adherence to the PS11(PM): Procedures in Pain Medicine Clinical Care Standard FFPMANZCA – one of the first Fellows of the Faculty in the country to have completed this newly established additional voluntary credentialing process to demonstrate further commitment towards the safe, appropriate and effective application of interventional pain therapies as part of multidisciplinary pain management.
His experiences encompass relevant areas of pain management including acute, perioperative, subacute and persistent pain, cancer, noncancer and cancer survivorship, and both in interventional and noninterventional pain management. He is a firm believer in the provision of safe, high-quality high-value care to every single one of his patients through the application of a multidisciplinary, whole-person approach to pain management with the person and their GP at the core of care provision, while combining these with the principles of Comprehensive Geriatric Assessments in those with complex aged care needs (and competing priorities), with holistic thorough internal medicine considerations of those with simple and complex multisystem multimorbidity.
Dr Teo’s current research areas lie in geriatric pain management, encompassing the unique challenges involved in managing polypharmacy, judicious use of procedural medicine, geriatric syndromes. He has particular interests in patient advocacy and empowering those with complex pain- and non pain-related chronic conditions through the breadth of application of contemporary interdisciplinary medicine to live through their pain.
Dr Teo holds public staff specialist appointments in the Department of Pain Management at the Prince of Wales Hospital, the Rapid Assessment Diagnosis Investigation Unit (RADIUS), the Sutherland Hospital Pain Service and the General Medicine Unit Departments at Sutherland Hospital. He also has private hospital visiting rights at the Prince of Wales Private and Waratah Private Hospitals. He enjoys teaching and supervising students and physician trainees alike, as a way of giving back to his vocation, and fostering an interest in pain medicine early in the careers of junior medical officers, and is an enthusiastic participant in his public hospital teaching programme. He is currently the Supervisor of Training at the Prince of Wales Hospital which is a Level 1 accredited pain management training centre in Randwick.
When he is not working, he and his wife are kept busy figuring out how to parent two young children.