The Centre has a small Management Team of clinical academics based at St Catherine’s College. The Director and Co-Director are Bill Fulford (doctor and philosopher) and Ashok Handa (surgeon). Ed Peile (doctor and medical educationalist) is the lead for training developments. Tom Dobbs and Zoe Barber (surgical registrars) run the program on surgical care. Joel Ward is lead for Undergraduate Values-based Surgical Care,  Michael Loughlin is Project Lead and Director – Literature Database Programme, David Davies (medical educator and health technologist) and Matt Ellacott (creative professional) run the website.

Centre Directors

Bill (KWM) Fulford
Faounder and Co-Director

Bill is a Fellow of St Catherine’s College and Member of the Philosophy Faculty, University of Oxford; and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Mental Health, University of Warwick Medical School. Values-based practice builds on his work in philosophical value theory. As Special Adviser for Values-Based Practice in the Department of Health (2007 – 2011) Bill led on a number of early training and policy initiatives combining evidence-based and values-based approaches.

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Ashok Handa
Director of the Collaborating Centre

Ashok is a Ashok is Professor of Vascular Surgery and Consultant at the John Radcliffe Hospital, Oxford and Director for Teaching in the Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences, Oxford University. He is Director of the Collaborating Centre for VBP and has led the development of the programme for values-based surgical care. Ashok is Fellow and Tutor for Graduates at St Catherine’s College, Oxford.

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Management Team

Zoe Barber
Lead for Surgical Care

Zoe Barber was awarded the Phebe Todd scholarship to study medicine at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2009. In 2015, she took up a Winston Churchill Memorial Trust Fellowship to work with the LA-based charity Project AngelFood. In February 2019, she was awarded the ASGBI Gold Medal for her performance in the FRCS (General) examination. She undertook her surgical training with a specialist interest in oncoplastic breast surgery in Oxford, the South West of England and Wales before taking up her consultant post in Cwm Taf Morgannwg University Health Board in August 2020. She was appointed Clinical Specialty Services Director (Breast) in November 2020. She has published a book, in numerous medical journals and presented nationally and internationally.After suffering an eclamptic seizure following the birth of her twins  in April 2019 and having her driving licence revoked for 6 months as a result, she undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis of seizure recurrence following eclampsia. She presented this research to the DVLA who have changed their national guidance as a result, meaning no other eclamptic woman will lose her driving licence.

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Dr David Crepaz-Keay
Lead for expertise by experience

David is Head of Applied Learning, at the Mental Health Foundation; a Fellow of the Royal Society for Public Health; and was a founder member of the National Survivor User Network, the UK’s leading network led by people living with a psychiatric diagnosis. He is also an ethics committee member of the International Society of Psychiatric Genetics; a former technical advisor to WHO Europe and a former senior mental health advisor to Public Health England. Within the Collaborating Centre, he is Lead for the Values-based Practice in Public Mental Health Network. David has substantial personal experience of using mental health services, including time as a detained patient, and now applies this experience and the learning from it in a systematic and productive way to improve outcomes for people who experience mental ill-health.

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David Davies

David is Associate Professor at Warwick Medical School with responsibility for academic leadership in technology enhanced learning. His research interests are primarily around educational technology including digital technologies in resource poor settings. He was one of the lead researchers in the EC-funded ETATMBA project, the main aim of which was to enhance the training and professionalisation of clinical officers in Malawi and Tanzania through the development of leadership, service improvement, and values based practice. David spends several weeks each year working in Africa on teaching and training activities.

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Ruth Devaraj
Administrator for the Collaborating Centre

I started working for the University in 2022 as Executive Assistant to Professor Chris Lavy OBE in NDORMS. In 2023 I joined the Health Economics Research Group as project manager and Executive Assistant to Professor Rafael Pinedo-Villanueva. . I am also the administrator for the Oxford University Global Surgery Group in NDS where I help to run their annual short course.

I am passionate about cross-cultural collaboration and have lived and worked overseas for most of my adult life. My previous roles have been in Primary and Secondary school teaching and charity administrative work in India.

I have a Bachelors degree in Divinity from Heythrop College, University of London.

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Thomas Dobbs
Lead for Surgical Care

Tom graduated with First Class Honours from the University of Oxford, followed by receiving the Hobson Mann scholarship and a Distinction in Clinical Medicine. He undertook his core surgical training in Oxford and is now an Academic Clinical Lecturer in Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery at the Welsh Centre for Burns and Plastic Surgery and Swansea University. He undertook a PhD in patient reported outcome measures (PROMs), with his research interests now spanning PROMs and novel technologies across the whole spectrum of plastic surgery. His interest in VBP began in Oxford where he was part of the team who set up the VBP in Surgery seminar series.

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Matthew Ellacott
Website Manager

Matt is the website manager for the Centre, and runs a business that provides web, design, and photography.

Before starting his business, Matt worked for 20 years in Financial Regulation and Compliance for a number of prestigious Asset Managers in the City of London.

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Nisha Hare
Undergraduate Teaching Team

Nisha graduated from St Catherine’s College, Oxford, in 2021 and is now an F1 working at Southmead Hospital in Bristol. She is hoping to pursue a career in Neurology and is also passionate about medical education, having taught students at Oxford and Bristol as well as designing an educational website called ’The Virtual Ward’. She was first exposed to the concept of VBP through the programme at Oxford and now delivers teaching on this to undergraduates at Oxford.

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Dr Dilraj Kalsi
Undergraduate Teaching Team - Surgical Care

Dr Dilraj Kalsi is a Doctor, Academic and Entrepreneur. He is Clinical AI Lead at Skin Analytics, who are world leaders in AI for skin cancer detection. He runs his own online clinic Hippocrates Lounge, supporting lifestyle change for long-term illness and led the implementation of a telehealth programme at St Bartholomew’s Hospital. During the pandemic, he developed Chipper, an app to help you build healthy habits. A Glaxo Scholar from the University of Oxford, Dilraj has authored many publications on Shared Decision-Making, including the e-book Pocket Values, and lectured in Digital Healthcare Science at the University of Warwick. His core focus is on empowering patients in order to optimise health outcomes and believes the correct implementation of digital technologies can help us get there.

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Michael Loughlin
Collaborating Centre Librarian

Michael is Professor of Applied Philosophy at the University of West London and Fellow of the England Centre for Practice Development at Canterbury Christ Church University.  He has written extensively on the relationship between evidence and values in health care and chairs the Special Interest Group in Health Philosophy for the European Society for Person-Centred Healthcare.  He edits the special thematic editions in health philosophy for the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. Michael developed the wikiVBP library and continues as librarian to the project.

Michael is a philosopher interested in underlying questions about knowledge and value in healthcare. His early work criticised the role of management theory in undermining professional autonomy, raised methodological questions about quality measures, bioethics and the use of evidence in health policy and defended a ‘virtues’ approach to practical wisdom.Recent work on medical epistemology raises questions about scientism and moral realism, defending a humanistic conception of rationality and science in practice. He's Associate Editor of the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice. I Chair the Special Interest Group in Health Philosophy for the European Society for Person Centered Healthcare.

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Dr Guilherme Messas
International Lead for Brazil

Main area of expertise: Phenomenological psychopathology and psychiatry, especially of drug addiction and related psychopathologies including

  1. the development of a phenomenologically-based therapeutics, which considers the individual as a whole;
  2. the formation of new generations of psychopathologists, psychologists and psychiatrists (through theoretical and practical teaching);
  3. the development of a phenomenological psychopatho-sociology of drug abusers;
  4. the development of strategies for social reinsertion of vulnerable populations in Brazil (aiming at reduction of criminality);
  5.  chief-editior of the journal “Psicopatologia Fenomenológica Contemporânea”;
  6. writing and publishing papers and books on the subject

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Michael Orrell
Undergraduate Teaching Team

Michael is an FY1 doctor in the Severn Deanery and completed his medical studies at the University of Oxford, graduating in 2021. He first became involved in values-based practice through delivering teaching on the subject to medical students at the University of Oxford in 2022. He is interested in research and teaching students, and is looking to pursue a pathology-based career, where evidence-based medicine and values-based practice intersect in MDT discussions about patients.

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Ed Peile
Lead for Training Developments

Ed is Professor Emeritus in Medical Education, University of Warwick, a Fellow of three Royal Medical Colleges in the UK, and was awarded the 2009 President’s Medal of the Academy of Medical Educators for his lifetime achievement in medical education. He has now retired from clinical practice but remains active in academic life, researching and publishing on values-based practice. He was recently appointed Chair of the Education, Training and Standards Committee of the Academy of Healthcare Sciences.

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Mihir Sheth
Lead for Digital Innovation

Mihir Sheth has experience in developing innovative medical devices across 3 continents. He strongly believes that healthcare innovation must follow the need-led philosophy rather than the tech-push philosophy. To that extent, he immerses himself in a clinical setting and identifies needs, along with the context that the problems lie in, alongside patients and clinicians. He was one of the first employees of Sisu Global Health, and worked on developing and bringing the Hemafuse, an autologous transfusion device, to hospitals in Kenya. As an Oxford Global Insight Fellow, he worked in hospitals in Senegal and UK to co-develop solutions with clinicians to problems faced by them, including on solutions to wean patients off the ventilator quicker.

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WikiVBP Reference Library

The wikiVBP Reference Library aims to provide a focused resource of literature and other materials supporting training, research and policy developments in values-based practice.

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Key Areas of Collaboration

Core activities of the Centre are based around three inter-linked areas, Education, Regulation and Integration, together with crosscutting themes of Theory and Practice

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Values-based Surgical Care

Values-based practice in surgery is an innovative approach to decision making in surgery, linking science with people.

 

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Training Materials and Resources

The CUP Book Series

Cambridge University Press has a VBP book series.

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