How Dr Kiran Peddi turned UK setbacks into a leading medical career in India

(Sep 22, 2026) From a Telugu-medium classroom in Warangal to medical training and consultant roles across the UK, Australia and India, Dr Kiran Peddi has built a career spanning gastroenterology, medical education and artificial intelligence, while helping Indian doctors find their footing abroad and earning a Guinness World Records title for an awareness lesson on inflammatory bowel disease (IBD), which includes conditions such as Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis.

In 1997, a young Dr Kiran Peddi and a couple of his friends boarded a flight to the UK to appear for PLAB (Professional and Linguistic Assessments Board), an exam they had barely prepared for, as they had no formal coaching or internet guidance.

As fate would have it, they failed the exam. Devastated, Dr Peddi almost gave up and decided to return home. The huge expenditure incurred for the UK trip made it even more punishing. Last-minute advice from his friend, not to give up just yet, made him stay back. He then worked hard and cleared the exam on his next attempt.

But clearing PLAB did not necessarily guarantee a job. For the next 11 months, the jobless youngster applied for as many as 550 positions in various hospitals, but in vain. Finally, on his 551st attempt, Colchester General Hospital offered him a job. That one opening set him on a career spanning the UK, Australia and India.

A Senior Consultant Gastroenterologist and Director, Centre for IBD at Yashoda Hospitals, Somajiguda, Dr Peddi went from a Telugu-medium classroom in Warangal to consultant posts across three continents, even turning down an offer to work at the National Health Service (NHS) in the UK.

The journey to the UK

He says most of the popular medical textbooks used across the world are written by British doctors. “The clinical methods we are taught were established by them. I wanted to train inside that system rather than read about it,” says Dr Peddi in a chat with The Global Indian. He had realised that PLAB was his entry route to the UK.

An unexpected interview question

Recalling his interview at Colchester General Hospital, Dr Peddi says he confidently answered all the questions about medicine and clinical knowledge. The last question came as a surprise.

“If Mr Tony Blair asked you for suggestions to improve the NHS, what would you say?” his interviewers asked. Dr Peddi replied: “Mr Blair, if you give me this two-year medical rotation, I promise to come back with some suggestions to improve the NHS, because it would have given me enough experience in this country to have an opinion worth hearing.”

His reply got the panel laughing. Dr Peddi eventually got the job.

Building a career in Britain

At Colchester, he says he soon became a favourite trainee of several consultants. He cleared all parts of the MRCP in the first attempt, then secured a five-year specialist registrar training programme in gastroenterology in the Manchester Deanery. He also obtained his CCT in Gastroenterology and General Medicine, marking the completion of his specialist training in the UK.

Having gone through the toughest phase of his life in the UK, Dr Peddi resolved that no Indian doctor arriving in Britain would have to navigate it as blindly as he had.

It led him to voluntarily help about 30 Indians, arranging clinical observerships so they had UK experience on their CVs, helping them find posts, and, in a number of cases, simply offering them a room in his own home until they found their feet.

“When you have no job and no income in an expensive country, accommodation is the thing that decides whether you can stay long enough to succeed,” says Dr Peddi, who spent more than a decade in the UK.

To Australia and back home

After turning down a consultant post in the NHS, with strong private practice potential alongside it, Dr Peddi instead took a fellowship in advanced endoscopy and IBD at Fremantle Hospital in Western Australia from 2009 to 2010.

He returned to India in 2010 and was only the second person in the then-combined state of Andhra Pradesh capable of performing endoscopic ultrasound. He was also among the first to establish dedicated IBD services in the state at Yashoda Hospital.

I could have comfortably stayed back in the UK. But comfort is not the same as being useful. I always wanted to return to India.
Dr Kiran Peddi

Back in India, Dr Peddi began extending his work beyond clinical practice. He pooled together 10 specialists and built a programme called Internal Medical Modules, teaching the practical aspects of clinical medicine to medical students.

“Over six years it reached roughly 2,500 students,” says Dr Peddi, who was appointed a Royal College examiner in 2019 and travels to the UK once every three months. To date, he has assessed 230 candidates taking the MRCP.

In 2012, he established Innovate Medical Centre in Hyderabad, running multi-speciality clinics. He also brought the MRCP (UK) international examination centre to Hyderabad. The exercise took years.

“The Royal College of Physicians visited us thrice and were satisfied that we had the infrastructure to run an examination centre. They awarded it to us,” says Dr Peddi of his initiative, which ensures that doctors can now qualify for a British postgraduate degree without flying abroad.

His work in IBD has also brought patients to Hyderabad from outside India. “Besides a large number of Indian patients, I treat a substantial number of international patients from the US, the UK and Bangladesh,” says Dr Peddi, reflecting the international reach of the specialised IBD care he provides.

Raising awareness about IBD

One of his more recent achievements was being awarded a Guinness World Records title for the largest inflammatory bowel disease awareness lesson.

Yashoda Hospital and I jointly hold the Guinness World Records title for the most people taking an IBD awareness lesson online and in a single venue simultaneously. There were 578 participants, in person and online. The record received coverage across 54 outlets in five languages, English, Telugu, Hindi, Urdu and Marathi, within 24 hours.
Dr Kiran Peddi

Dr Peddi says that a record of that kind was worth the effort.

“Inflammatory Bowel Disease in India is missed, mislabelled and dismissed as ordinary stomach trouble, and the cost of that is measured in years of a young person’s life,” says Dr Peddi, who has trained thousands of undergraduate and postgraduate doctors through programmes he designed himself.

The toughest cases

His years in gastroenterology have also brought him face to face with some of the most challenging cases of his career. Among them was one in Britain, during his registrar training, which he describes as his toughest encounter.

“A lady with liver cirrhosis came in with massive haematemesis, vomiting blood in quantities that were, frankly, mind-boggling.” Bleeding of that severity in a cirrhotic patient is among the most lethal emergencies in his specialty. “Endoscopic treatment failed to control it. The only remaining option was balloon tamponade with a Sengstaken tube, which is a procedure you hope is never needed. We got the bleeding under control.”

Another challenging case was that of a middle-aged Indian woman who arrived with severe perianal Crohn’s disease. “Perianal Crohn’s does not merely cause symptoms; it removes a person from their own life. I took it as a challenge and designed her treatment carefully. She showed remarkable improvement,” says Dr Peddi, who describes it as one of his most gratifying experiences.

From Telugu-medium school to medicine

Behind the specialist who went on to train in three countries is a much more modest beginning. Born in Jagtial town in what was then Karimnagar district in the united Andhra Pradesh, Dr Peddi’s father was a senior executive with the erstwhile AP State Electricity Board in Warangal.

His mother was a homemaker. His primary education was in Hanamkonda, after which he moved to St Gabriel’s High School in Kazipet for his middle and higher schooling. he never once missed securing the first rank during his school years.

People often assume that a career built in Britain and Australia must have started in an English-medium classroom. Mine did not. Everything was in Telugu medium.

Dr Kiran Peddi

For his intermediate education, Dr Peddi moved to Vignan Residential College at Vadlamudi, near Guntur. “This was the hardest academic transition of my life,” says the gastroenterologist, who secured rank 131 in EAMCET at the first attempt, breaking the college’s academic records of that period.

Outside the books, cricket was his first love. “I played through my school years and I was an enormous Kapil Dev fan,” says Dr Peddi, whose parents wanted him to become a doctor from the very beginning. He completed his MBBS from Kakatiya Medical College in 1996.

India vs UK: the challenges of IBD care

The return to India also brought Dr Peddi face to face with a different set of challenges. He says diagnostic delay remains one of his biggest concerns. By the time an IBD patient reaches him, too much time has already passed.

“Symptoms get attributed to infection, to irritable bowel, to diet, to stress, and the patient is treated empirically for months or years before anybody investigates properly.”

In Britain, a patient with the same presentation is worked up far sooner, he says. There are infrastructure gaps as well, according to Dr Peddi, with very few dedicated IBD nurse specialists, while techniques such as intestinal ultrasound, which allow non-invasive monitoring of disease activity, are still not widely available in India.

He says it is very easy for a patient in India to lose trust in the doctor. “When someone has already approached a few doctors before me, they have already been given several different explanations. When told they have a lifelong condition requiring expensive treatment, scepticism is a rational response.”

In the UK, he says, the system carries some of that trust on the clinician’s behalf. The referral pathway itself confers legitimacy.

His prescription for gut health

Away from the complexities of IBD care, Dr Peddi’s own approach to gut health is relatively simple.

What actually protects the gut is unglamorous. One should get enough fibre from vegetables and fruits, maintain regular meal timings, adequate hydration, physical activity, and not reach for antibiotics or acid-suppressing medication casually.

Dr Kiran Peddi

His own diet comprises black coffee first thing in the morning, followed by oats with a banana for breakfast. “Lunch is boiled vegetables and boiled eggs while dinner is grilled chicken or fish with vegetables,” says Dr Peddi, who hits the gym thrice a week.

Road ahead

His next chapter is taking that clinical experience into artificial intelligence. Dr Peddi’s plans are focused on contributing to medical education and IBD care using AI. He is building the KP-3P model as a clinical decision support system for IBD patients through mygastro.ai, which aims to address inconsistency in care.

Dr Peddi is currently a research scholar in Generative AI at Golden Gate University in San Francisco. “I’m researching how AI can mentor young doctors at scale,” says Dr Peddi, who otherwise enjoys Bollywood music, movies and socialising with friends and family in his free time.

• Follow Dr Kiran Peddi on Instagram 

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