Dr Tom Hughes receives an OBE in New Year Honours list
30/12/2019
This article is more than four years old.
Dr Tom Hughes was awarded an OBE in the New Year Honours list, which was published on Friday 27 December 2019, for his national leadership role in health technology.
Dr Hughes' main project has been devising and leading a national NHS IT project to improve IT in all emergency departments - the Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS) - that has been completed on time and within budget.
Some of the benefits of the new ECDS system are already apparent, for example during the flu season ECDS accurately captures patient diagnosis in a way not previously possible.
Dr Hughes was a junior doctor at the John Radcliffe, and re-joined Oxford University Hospitals (OUH) as a consultant in Emergency Medicine in 2005, having trained in the UK and Australia.
He has also been involved for many years teaching medical students in Emergency Medicine as part of the University of Oxford's Nuffield Department of Orthopaedics, Rheumatology and Musculoskeletal Sciences (NDORMS).
Dr Hughes continues to work at the JR part-time, and also for NHS England and NHS Improvement on Same Day Emergency Care and on other health IT projects, for example monitoring NHS patients in the community using wearable technology.
Dr Hughes says: "I was surprised and humbled to receive this honour and am very grateful for the support of my colleagues in the Emergency Department which made this possible."
Dr James Ray, Emergency Department Consultant at OUH, adds: "Tom's foresight and vision led to the introduction of a completely new way for A&E to be able to demonstrate what actually happens to patients within the department, for the very first time allowing quality care to be visible: the creation and national introduction of the Emergency Care Data Set.
"Despite the respect that is held for him by NHS leaders, he remains humble, kind and is always willing to help answer the simplest of questions about the complex world of informatics."