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Birmingham Surgical Trials Consortium
Tom is Director of Birmingham Surgical Trials Consortium (BiSTC). The BiSTC is funded by the Royal College of Surgeons of England to develop new surgical clinical trials, widening participation in trials and train the trialists of the future.
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Birmingham Centre for Observational and Prospective Studies
This new unit was established in 2019 and Tom co-leads it with Dr Laura Magill. Birmingham Centre for Observational and Prospective Studies (BiCOPS) aims to provide centralised guidance and practical support to groups of researchers coming together to undertake non-randomised prospective research, including large scale national and international clinical snapshot audits and cohort studies.
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Clinical Research - Grants
In the past 10 years Tom has been awarded £4.35M as the chief investigator of 5 major NIHR portfolio surgical projects to benefit patients through improved surgical care; 4 are multicentre RCTs and one for the development of a surgical device. He is also a co-applicant on 13 further grants totalling £11.2M.
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Inflammatory Bowel Disease
Tom’s specialist clinical interest is in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). He was Chief Investigator of the NIHR Research for Public Benefit (RfPB) funded ACCURE-UK feasibility trial. This has been followed more recently with the NIHR EME-funded ACCURE-UK 2 trial, which is the UK arm of an international RCT being conducted alongside colleagues at Academisch Medisch Centrum, Amsterdam. ACCURE-UK 2 is exploring the clinical effectiveness of therapeutic appendicectomy to reduce disease activity in Ulcerative Colitis.
In addition to this clinical research, Tom also sits on the Inflammatory Bowel Disease sub-committee of the Association of Coloproctology of GB&I (ACPGBI) and the National Inflammatory Bowel Disease Clinical Advisory Group of the Royal College of Surgeons & ACPGBI. He has been an invited clinician stakeholder in a variety of clinical guideline update groups, both in the UK and Europe.
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Surgical Site Infection (SSI)
He was the Chief Investigator of the ROSSINI (Reduction of Surgical Site Infection using a Novel Intervention, 2008-13) trial. ROSSINI randomised 760 patients across 21 sites and explored the clinical efficacy of a wound-edge protection device in the reduction of SSI. The results were published in the British Medical Journal. Following this, Tom has had two other major SSI trials funded, SUNRRISE (senior applicant) and ROSSINI2 (chief applicant). ROSSINI 2 is the first multi-arm, multi-stage (MAMS) interventional trial funded in surgery and will recruit over 6,600 patients. He is a co-applicant on the FALCON and CHEETAH trials (both global), as well as Bluebelle and PPAC-2. Tom sit on the NICE Guidelines Committee for SSI.
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International research networks
Tom is a member of the European Society of Coloproctology (ESCP) Research Committee and Chair of the ESCP Cohort Studies Subcommittee. He has led the ESCP international snapshot audits in 2015, 2016 and 2017 – together these collected outcomes data from over 11,000 individual patients undergoing operations in over 350 surgical units across 49 countries.
Tom is the Clinical Research Co-Lead for division 6 and the surgical Clinical Research Speciality Lead (CRSL) for the NIHR CRN West Midlands, promoting and facilitating the involvement of surgeons across the region in clinical portfolio trials. He chairs two NIHR trial steering committees (TSCs), sits on four other TSCs and two data monitoring committees.
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Trainee-centric research collaboratives
Research collaboratives: After helping found the West Midlands Research Collaborative, Tom has have spoken and published extensively on the collaborative research model, and helped many new collaboratives to establish in multiple specialities at all levels, in the UK and overseas.