Doctors receive New Year's Honours
31/12/2015
This article is more than eight years old.
Doctors who have served Oxfordshire patients have been recognised in the 2016 New Year's Honours list.
Professor Chris Bulstrode and Professor Keith Willett have been recognised with the Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) honour.
Professor Bulstrode has been recognised for his work with Doctors of the World, which provides medics to support people affected by war, natural disasters, disease, hunger, poverty or exclusion across the globe.
His visits overseas have included Haiti after an earthquake in 2010, treatment of Ebola patients in Sierra Leone as well as in Afghanistan, Ukraine, Palestine and Nepal.
He is an Emeritus Professor of Orthopaedic Surgery at the University of Oxford's Green Templeton College and worked as a consultant at the Trust's John Radcliffe Hospital and Nuffield Orthopaedic Centre from 1982 until his retirement in 2010.
He said: "Getting involved in humanitarian aid work is the dream for many of us doctors and nurses. It has been an honour to be invited to join the teams set up by Doctors of the World and to contribute what I can. Certainly helping those less well off than ourselves, especially when war or disaster has struck, feels like one of the most useful thing that we can do.
"I do hope this award will stand as a recognition of the work of those teams, not of an individual. Sometimes the work can be dangerous. I don't have any solutions to that. Luckily there is usually very little time to think of the risks, and it seems to me that if a job has to be done and all possible precautions have been taken, then the sooner you get on with it and finish the job, the better."
Professor Willett is the Director for Acute Care to NHS England and is the Professor of Orthopaedic Trauma Surgery at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of Wolfson College. An NHS consultant surgeon for 24 years, he has extensive experience of trauma care, driving service transformation and healthcare management. He has taught surgery and leadership extensively across the NHS and internationally.
Prof Willett was the co-founder of the unique 24-hour consultant-resident Oxford Trauma Service at the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford in 1994. Building on that model, in 2009 he was appointed the first National Clinical Director for Trauma Care to the Department of Health and was charged with developing and implementing government policy across the NHS to radically improve the care of older people with fragility hip fractures, and to establish Regional Trauma Networks and Major Trauma Centres.
By 2012 both re-organisations and care pathways were successfully in place and are now credited with marked improvement in patient care and survival.
In 2003 he founded the Kadoorie Centre for Critical Care Research and Education at the John Radcliffe, focusing on the treatment of critically ill and injured patients.
In 2015, the Injury Minimization Programme for Schools (I.M.P.S - www.impsweb.co.uk) a children's safety charity he launched, celebrated 20 years and over 250,000 children trained in risk-awareness, first aid and life support.
In his current role, he has the national medical oversight of acute NHS services, ranging from pre-hospital and ambulance services, emergency departments, urgent surgery, acute medicine, children's and maternity, armed forces, and health and justice services and national major incidents. He is now leading the transformation of the urgent and emergency care services across the NHS in England.
He said: "I have been enormously privileged to build a career with so many dedicated individuals and friends who are our NHS."