Professor Tim Stokes holds his MD thesis, which represents two decades of research across two countries.
If you think graduating once as a doctor is a big achievement, try three times.
Professor Tim Stokes, from the Dunedin School of Medicine, is graduating on Saturday with the rare degree of Doctor of Medicine (MD), on top of already having a medical degree (MB ChB) from Edinburgh and a PhD in health services research from Leicester.
“I’m really proud to be going on to the stage to get this degree from Otago. I’ve had tremendous opportunities here and have great colleagues,” Tim says.
Otago’s Doctor of Medicine degree is an unsupervised, higher doctoral degree based on published original research of special excellence in a branch of medical science. The degree is only awarded once or twice a year on average and Otago’s MD graduates are a very distinguished group, including nine Knights and one Dame.
An academic general practitioner (GP) from the United Kingdom, Tim joined the University of Otago – Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka in 2014 to take up the Elaine Gurr Chair of General Practice. He is also Head of the Department of General Practice and Rural Health, Co-Director of Otago’s Centre for Health Systems and Technology, and a part-time GP in Dunedin.
Tim’s MD thesis charts a 20-year journey of health services research by an academic GP working in the UK and in Aotearoa New Zealand.
His research started with a focus on how to best develop clinical guidelines for practitioners to use with their patients and then moved on to ways of ensuring guideline recommendations improve clinical practice and health care delivery.
“Where I’ve ended up is with the use of implementation science to better understand how research findings can become embedded in routine health care in clinical, organisational and policy contexts.”
Tim says preparing his thesis gave him the opportunity to see his research as a “coherent whole”, showing the links and commonalities.
While in the UK, Tim established a national profile in health care quality improvement research and development through more than a decade of influential work with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE).
It was there that he realised how much he enjoyed bringing different groups of people together, such as clinicians, technical experts and lay people, to work on committees to develop guidelines that changed clinical practice for the better, from how to manage coughs and colds, to long-term health conditions such as epilepsy and obesity.
“For me, successful committee work is all about working through relationships – getting to know the people in the room and what makes them tick.”
As a GP, most of Tim’s career has been spent working with more deprived populations and it’s important to him that the research he’s done has always had practical benefits.
Whether in clinical, research or teaching settings, the main purpose is still how to achieve the best for patients.
Tim says that’s challenging given the pressures New Zealand’s primary and secondary health care system is under.
“The main issue is that services aren’t being funded adequately. I think it’s fixable; we’ve still got a good public health system, it’s just that it’s under a lot of strain.”
“There’s a nice symmetry in having an Edinburgh medical degree and then getting an MD from Otago, given Dunedin is Gaelic for Edinburgh and Dunedin is the Edinburgh of the South,” he says.
“It is a privilege to have come to Otago and it’s been a very positive experience.”
-Kōrero by Andrea Jones, Team Leader, Divisional Communications