Lifetime Achievement Award 2025 – Dr Mike Mendall MB.BS, MA, MD, FRCP

Dr Mike Mendall MB.BS, MA, MD, FRCP
Consultant Gastroenterologist Croydon University Hospital and Honorary Senior Lecturer St George’s Hospital Medical School.

Proposer: Abdul Sultan

CONTRIBUTION TO CMS

1. When president of CMS, he made a number of innovations to move the society on from its previous format of 3 meetings a year at Shirley Oaks and the annual dinner at Chateaux Napolean. He rotated meeting venues and changed the location of the annual dinner.
2. He introduced the annual Lifetime Achievement Award
3. He is the longest serving member of the CMS committee.
4. Other innovations, such as the ‘presidential hat’ ala Colonel Gadaffi, which he handed to his successor Muti Abulafi, have not continued as Muti lost the hat!

NON-RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

• He has never had a day off sick in 25 years as a consultant in Croydon which, according to average NHS rates of sickness (4% before the pandemic and now run to 8%) means that by his calculations, he has worked an entire year for free.
• As chair of the R and D committee in 2000, he played a major role in establishing and developing the R and D department at CUH and helped supervise a number of research fellows towards MDs.
• He has led the gastroenterology team for 15 years at CUH.
• He served on a number of national committees, including the British Society of Gastroenterology and the Upper GI Cancer National Cancer Intelligence Network.
• He was head of service for medicine for two stints of three years and helped modernise the service.

RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

He had an active research career with more than 100 publications, including first-world reports many made whilst working at CUH. He began work as a consultant in Croydon in 1995, and continued to run a research lab whilst doing his consultant job, for a further 5 years. During this period, he raised 1.5 million pounds in grant funding.

The central theme of his research career began whilst on elective in rural Bihar, a very backward area of India, in 1984. He was struck by the small size of the children, being only 60% of WHO norms yet appearing healthy. He became interested in the possibility that chronic low-grade insults could produce qualitatively similar effects to more obvious illnesses and that these could explain the differences in growth and height. In those days, we lacked assays for various markers of inflammation sufficiently sensitive to measure levels within apparently healthy people. He spent the first part of his research career developing and exploiting such assays to demonstrate widely differing health experiences related to these small differences.

Achievements include:

• Many aspects of H. pylori transmission, including the first evidence that it was mainly transmitted in childhood (Lancet 1992) and transmitted between children at school(BMJ 1994), the latter utilising a novel test of salivary western blotting for antibodies which was developed in his lab.
• One of the first reports of the relation of CRP levels within the normal range with a wide range of cardiovascular risk factors and with cardiovascular disease itself pointing to the inflammatory basis for this and most human chronic disease (1996). This involved the development of a sensitive assay for CRP in his lab able to measure down to 0.001mg/dl.
• The first study exploring the levels and determinants of CRP levels in children (1996) demonstrated that levels in children are much lower than in adults and related to abdominal adiposity.
• He was the first to propose a possible association between Helicobacter pylori infection and coronary heart disease (1994), which he no longer fully believes himself, but which continues to receive attention from the wider research community. It has recently become of greater relevance as the appreciation of the role of gut microbiome in human disease becomes better appreciated.
• He undertook and designed one the first antibiotic intervention studies in coronary heart disease directed at two organism, Chlamydia pneumoniae and H. pylori. He believes that the study worked not because of effects on either of these two organisms, but possibly due to effects on other unspecified organisms.
• He was the first to describe the relation of serum cytokine levels with cardiovascular risk factors as a risk of cardiovascular disease (1997). This was subsequently expanded upon by other researchers and is now orthodoxy.
• He was the first to report an association between childhood affluence and antibiotic use with risk of IBS (2008).
• He performed the only randomized placebo-controlled trial of Aloe Vera in IBS.
• He also performed the only study to explore the determinants of the inflammatory response to standardized injury, which showed that baseline CRP is a marker of immune system reactivity and that it is this reactivity which explains the relation of CRP levels to death, from most forms of chronic disease.
• He has the second highest number of citations on google scholar at CUH.
• He performed a number of clinical studies in collaboration with Professor Devinder Kumar into dietary influences on Crohn’s disease activity. The main findings were the deleterious effects of red meat and eggs.
• He conducted the first study exploring the determinants of bowel inflammation as indicated by faecal calprotectin in a general population sample in Croydon in 2002. This showed that obesity, lack of fibre and lack of exercise were the main determinants and the likely link between these environmental factors and the risk of colorectal cancer.
• As a result of these findings, he went on to propose that obesity counter-intuitively was a risk factor for Crohn’s disease, performing the first study to support this. This was based on CUH IBD patients was published in 2013 and has received widespread confirmation. Following this, he had a fruitful collaboration with Professor Tine Jess in Copenhagen and was able to confirm and extend these associations in a number of Danish national datasets, leading to publication in high-profile journals.
• An observational study of the determinants of mortality amongst hospital patients during the first COVID wave from March to April 2020. This showed that obesity frailty and age were the only independent determinants of mortality, with chronic disease not playing an independent role.

Annual Dinner 2024 at Farleigh Golf Club

On Friday 14 June, a wonderful evening was enjoyed by 65 members and guests at Farleigh Golf Club. The venue and food were excellent. Throughout the evening, we were entertained by Bertie the Magician with lovely background music by Mark Dowling on his piano. Our outgoing President, Miss Ranee Thakar, presented a richly deserved Lifetime Achievement Award Medal to Dr John Spicer and then handed over the Presidency to Dr Nick Ford. He was presented with the CMS Presidential Medal and Gavel, with every good wish for him to have a successful year.

Many photos were taken – these can be viewed in the members part of the website.

Lifetime Achievement Award 2024 – Dr John Spicer

Nomination of Dr John Spicer for the 2024 Lifetime Achievement Award

John’s medical career started when he graduated from Middlesex Hospital Medical School in 1977 (in the same graduation year as Nick Cambridge). His junior posts were in the Midlands and then he escaped to sunnier climes of Australia and New Zealand, working as both a GP and psychiatrist – this psychiatric experience would help prepare him for the population of South Norwood.

He became a GP partner at Woodside Health Centre in 1985 and remains to this day, having survived the multitude of practice splits, mergers and take overs! John and I merged our practices in 2008, forming Woodside Group Practice.
John was the VTS programme director at Croydon for a number of years – inspiring generations of junior doctors, many of whom still work in Croydon, including myself.

John remains passionate about educating the younger clinicians, specialising in Medical Ethics and how art integrates with medicine. He is a Course Tutor and Examiner for the Worshipful Society of Apothecaries in London and lectures and tutors for Barts, King’s and St George’s. He was the Head of GP School from 2010, and then Head of Primary Care Education and Development (South London) for Health Education England from 2014. He has also been involved with medical schools in Brunei and Gozo.

John is a very well-respected author and his publications spread across six pages of his CV. They include clinical reviews, clinical research, books and chapters. John is particularly interested in ethics and education, and he is often invited to speak across the world.

Having worked with John for over 25 years, I have been fortunate to experience his wisdom, humour, patience and knowledge first hand. However, I have also struggled to decipher his handwriting and instructions, struggled to understand the Latin he casually drops into practice meeting discussions.

I feel that John is a worthy recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award – but this does NOT mean that John is ready to retire!

Dr Ruth Clery

Lifetime Achievement Award 2023 – Mr Kambiz Hashemi

A special moment during our Family Fun Day was when Mr Kambiz Hashemi was presented with a well-deserved Croydon Medical Society Lifetime Achievement Award. The medal was presented by Dr Agnelo Fernandes and Dr Nick Cambridge read out a citation of why he had nominated him for the award.

Mr Hashemi is a long-standing member of the Croydon Medical Society and a past President of the Society. He still works on a part-time basis at CUH as an Emergency Care Consultant and is very well respected.

Citation

It is with great pleasure that I propose Mr Kambiz Hashemi for the 2023 Croydon Medical Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Kambiz has been the driving force with the Emergency Department (ED) at Mayday Hospital (now Croydon University Hospital) since his appointment in 1985. Now there are 10 consultants and over 60 junior doctors.

During his early years, he wrote the Major Incident Procedures (which was seriously tested with the 1989 Purley train crash). He started resuscitation training and made it mandatory for all junior doctors. With a “Resusci Annie,” he visited many practices to teach basic life support and built close links with many GP practices. He started to run GP Saturday workshops at the PGMC on minor surgery and joint injections.

Kambiz made hospital-wide induction training day mandatory for all new junior doctors and weekly teaching for junior ED doctors. He wrote a guidebook covering the management of acute medical and surgical emergencies. He fostered close links with Atkinson Morley Hospital and formulated local and later regional head injury management and referral guidelines.

In 1986 he started the first open-access hand clinic and continued this for 30 years. He also developed occupational hand therapy as an integral adjunct to hand surgery.

In 1991 He was appointed as the Clinical tutor and for the next five years worked closely with the GP Clinical Tutor hosting regular lunchtime sessions at the PGMC for both Croydon GPs and consultants.

He has many publications including the first publication in the UK of the measurement of cardiac enzymes in suspected MI.
He has chaired many local, regional and national working parties. He joined the occupational safety committee of the Medical Commission on Accident Prevention Commission and in 1994 became the chairman of the Commission.

He was active in setting up an A&E section at the Royal Society of Medicine and later became President.

In 1989 Advance Trauma Life Support was adopted in the UK and he was one of the first wave of consultants in the UK to become ATLS instructors. Since 1996 he has been running four ATLS courses a year at CUH.

One of his proudest achievements is his involvement and collaboration with both the Faculty of EM (Now the Royal College of EM) and the London Deanery in setting up and expanding the senior registrar training in SW Thames.

Following the opening of the new ED in 2019, he continues working for two days a week at the Urgent Care Centre at CUH.

Congratulations Kambiz on your well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award.

Lifetime Achievement Award 2022
– Dr Nick Cambridge

Nick moved to Croydon in 1984 and was a principal GP in general practice for 25yrs. He also became a clinical assistant in rheumatology to Dr Jeff Reardon at Croydon General, sat on the Croydon Local Medical Committee and was chairman of the Croydon Hospitals archive committee.

Nick enjoyed having medical students at his practice and was a clinical tutor for general practice at St George’s hospital. In 1999 London Inner Zone Funding became available and he was successful in applying to study for an MD degree in medical history at the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL and graduated in 2002. His thesis was about an internationally known GP called Alfred Carpenter who worked in Croydon from 1852-1892. Alfred Carpenter’s marble bust is now in the PGMC.

Nick and his staff had a large number of elderly patients on their list and he decided to organise parties for them. One year Nick dressed up as Snow White and seven of his staff as dwarfs. Tea and entertainment were also laid on and frail patients had transport provided.

Nick was presented with a health education award by Sebastian Coe at the Royal College of Surgeons, for the informative monthly newsletter that was published to a group of GP surgeries. The monthly newsletter kept patients up to date with clinical information as well as topical news.

Raising money for charity was something Nick was passionate about. His staff and their families regularly entered swimathons at Trinity school which were organised by the East Croydon Rotary Club. Nick also raised money for charity by competing in three arduous BT 5000m (3.1mile) swimathons. The morale and well-being of his staff were always very important to Nick and he organised barn dances plus annual Christmas parties at the Chateau Napoleon.

In addition to his book, Nick has had numerous publications many on matters related to the history of medicine, historical figures in medicine as well as medical problems of historical figures.

Nick is a long-standing member of CMS and is a past President and currently is our Honorary Archivist. I believe he may be best known amongst us for his informative and amusing talks, mainly on the subject of Charles Dickens, medicine and medicinal matters of the past. He has recently had his first book published, which was a great achievement for him.

Congratulations Nick on your well-deserved Lifetime Achievement Award

Lifetime Achievement Award 2020
– Dr Agnelo Fernandes

Message written by Dr Peter Boffa

It is with great pleasure that I proposed Dr Agnelo Fernandes for the Croydon Medical Society Lifetime Achievement Award. Agnelo has been a driving force throughout his career, not only developing his practice and premises but perhaps, more importantly, he has driven change in Croydon over many years, usually with most of his fellow GP’s kicking and screaming! Anyone reading Agnelo’s CV could not be anything other than impressed by the broad list of achievements, prizes and awards that he has received, including his MBE. I wanted to pick out a few examples of what he has achieved that perhaps may not know.

In the late 90’s the GP cooperative movement took hold to manage out of hours care. Agnelo worked night and day to set up the service and Croydoc, as it was known, was extremely successful and I remember my life being revolutionised by the removal of on-call work with the option of working, or not, for the service. I think all GPs here who worked through that period will remember how hard Agnelo worked, all the night shifts to keep it going plus all the emails coming out at 2, 3 and 4 am to keep it running. There was also the unexpected benefit of GP’s from different practices collaborating, talking and networking, really for the first time.

In 2007 Agnelo was determined to try to push through more clinical commissioning to develop patient pathways and convened a group of 5 like-minded practices (including mine in Old Coulsdon) and they set up a company called Pentahealth. This was a short-lived venture that did not have much success – although we had ultrasound commissioned from our surgeries which was a great innovation and fantastic for the patients. What Pentahealth did do though, was to incite fury from uninvolved practices who vented their ire by forming the GP organisation that, over time, morphed into the Federation. Again, perhaps another unintended consequence.

When Agnelo was asked to become the Croydon Professional Executive Committee chair around 2010 he was accused by some LMC colleagues of going over to the “Dark Side”! What they meant was collaborating with the Commissioners of the day. Well I have to say that Agnelo has always been on the Dark Side – however, he has never forgotten that he is first and foremost a GP and has always championed improved patient care. He has always been a passionate believer in clinical engagement and has recruited dozens of Croydon GPs to become clinical leaders. The morphing of Croydon CCG to the STP, sadly reverses that progress.

Agnelo, Croydon Medical Society salutes the hard work and dedication you have shown to patients and the profession both locally and nationally.
Congratulations on your Lifetime Achievement Award.