Health | Science

19 May 11

Professor Sir Richard Peto’s outstanding career in medical research has been recognised by the 2011 Lifetime Achievement Award from the BMJ Group at a ceremony in London last night, following a vote by the British Medical Journal's readers.

The award seeks to recognise a unique and substantial contribution to improving health. His work has contributed to reduced death rates in many areas of the world by demonstrating the effectiveness of some widely practicable treatments, the hazards of smoking and, in particular, the benefits of stopping smoking.

Dr Ann McPherson of the Department of Primary Health Care was another Oxford winner at the awards dinner, being named as the Communicator of the Year.

Professor Sir Richard Peto wins the BMJ Group Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lifetime achievement

Professor Peto, an epidemiologist and statistician, is codirector with Sir Rory Collins of the Clinical Trial Service Unit (CTSU) at the University of Oxford, which conducts large studies of the causes and treatment of disease worldwide.

In collaboration with Sir Richard Doll, Professor Peto demonstrated the extraordinary hazards of persistent cigarette smoking, which exceed those from all the other known causes of cancer put together. He also showed the substantial benefits of stopping smoking, directly influencing public policy in many countries.

Professor Peto has worked in close collaboration with Professor Sir Rory Collins on large scale randomised evidence since the 1980s. In particular, they showed that the importance of blood pressure and blood cholesterol concentrations in heart disease had been underestimated.

He founded the Early Breast Cancer Trialists’ Collaborative Group in 1985, which in bringing together the best evidence on treatments has helped decrease breast cancer mortality since the 1980s. This decrease is now steep in many countries but is steepest in the UK.

Professor Peto said: ‘The BMJ Group call it a lifetime achievement award, but actually it's an inter-generational award, given for studies over more than 60 years of the causes and the treatment of chronic disease. These studies were started by Richard Doll, who brought me with him to Oxford 40 years ago, continued by me and are now being carried forward in new ways by Rory Collins and others in the CTSU.

‘At the UK death rates of 40 years ago just over one in 3 would die before age 70, but at current UK death rates just under 1 in 6 will do so. The main reasons that the risk of death before old age has gone down by more than half in the UK over the past 40 years is that lots of people have stopped smoking, and nowadays people at risk of vascular disease are taking drugs that work.’

The essence of a good doctor

Dr Ann McPherson has instigated a number of successful health information projects with communication at their heart. She was praised for the imaginative way in which she conveys the complexities and technical details of medicine to a wider audience and helps to change the way people think about important issues.

‘If you’re a good doctor, you have to be able to communicate,’ she says. ‘Communication is the essence of being a good doctor.’

Healthtalkonline.org is a patient website which allows people with different health conditions to benefit from the experiences of others who have been in the same position. Ten years after it was first set up, the site now covers 60 different illnesses and health issues and receives two million hits every month. Based on research carried out at Oxford University, the enterprise has now resulted in a research group dedicated to patient experiences.

The Diary of a Teenage Health Freak, written with Aidan Macfarlane, provides adolescents with facts and advice while making them smile, and Women’s Health is a leading handbook for GPs which Dr McPherson edited with Dr Deborah Waller.

It’s clear that all these efforts have been born of a desire to give the patient the best information possible and enabling them to be involved in their own treatment. ‘It’s about putting the patients at the centre of their own healthcare,’ she says.

Most recently, Dr McPherson created the group Healthcare Professionals for Assisted Dying (HPAD) which campaigns for greater patient choice at the end of life, including the option of assisted dying subject to legal safeguards.

Dr McPherson is herself reaching the end of her life. Her pancreatic cancer is at a terminal stage and she was unable to attend the BMJ Group’s award ceremony last night. Yet she still recorded a video message that was shown at the event.

On being informed she had won the award, she says she was delighted but stressed that the award should also recognise all the others involved in these projects. ‘They were all very much team efforts. Collaboration is vital. No one does these things on their own.’