Tom Marshall graduated MB ChB from the University of Edinburgh in 1987. He undertook clinical posts in hospitals the UK, South Africa and Gibraltar where he acquired his interest in the wider determinants of health and organisation of health care systems. In 1991 he undertook a MSc Health Economics at University of York. Following this he returned to clinical medicine to complete vocational training in general practice and his MRCGP before specialising in public health medicine in Northamptonshire. During this period he completed his MSc in Public Health, obtained the MFPH and spent a total of one year (in 1996 and 1997) working for the WHO Regional Office for Europe on health care systems and health care reforms in European countries.

In 1999 Tom moved to an academic post in public health in University of Birmingham and completed his PhD: an economic evaluation of cardiovascular disease prevention in primary care. In 2003 to 2004 he spent a year as a Commonwealth Fund Harkness Fellow in Health Policy in Harvard Medical School.

From 2005 to 2010 he was Programme Director of the University of Birmingham Master of Public Health.

Tom’s research interests are diverse. Common themes include his interest in addressing practical and substantial health problems and a focus on primary care. In 2000 his seminal paper on the potential for taxation to influence diet achieved worldwide media coverage and has sparked a number of subsequent papers by other authors. He has published on the use of statistical process control for quality improvement in health care and for monitoring mortality rates in primary care. He has researched patients views and preferences in relation to taking drug treatments to prevent cardiovascular disease. His work on the economics of cardiovascular prevention in primary care has been influential in the 2008 NICE guidelines on lipid lowering. He has published several papers on the effects of variation in the measurement of risk factors on clinical decision making. More recent work has investigated the potential for targeted case finding of patient at high risk of cardiovascular disease using information recorded in electronic primary care records. This is being evaluated in primary care based a cluster randomised controlled trial in the West Midlands. He has also investigated using electronic primary care records for the identification of patients at high risk of suspected colorectal cancer and is interested in making greater use of electronic records to improve patient care. He is currently leading a project to link cancer registry records on colorectal cancer to electronic primary care records.

Tom is a member of the grant awarding panel of the National Institute of Health Research’s (NIHR) Research for Patient Benefit fund and a reviewer for many grant awarding bodies. He is a member of the editorial board of the Health Technology Assessment journal, the archive journal of the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme. 

Teaching Programmes

• Master of Public Health
• Masters in Clinical and Community Primary Care
• MB ChB
• MB ChB (Graduate Entry Curriculum)
• BMedSci

Tom is interested in supervising doctoral research students in the following areas:

• Analysis of electronic primary care records databases particularly in relation to prediction models for cardiovascular diseases, cancers or other chronic diseases
• Chronic disease management
• Analysis of factors influencing primary care prescribing decisions
• Application of statistical process control to quality improvement in primary care
• Applied health care research and evaluation of health service developments in primary care

If you are interesting in studying any of these subject areas please contact Tom on the contact details above, or for any general doctoral research enquiries, please email: dr@contacts.bham.ac.uk or call +44 (0)121 414 5005.

For a full list of available Doctoral Research opportunities, please visit our Doctoral Research programme listings.

RESEARCH THEMES

Early diagnosis of cancers in primary care using electronic primary care records

Prevention of cardiovascular disease in primary care

Chronic disease management in primary care

Statistical process control and quality improvement

Patient preferences in relation to preventive treatments

Factors influencing GP prescribing decisions in relation to cardiovascular prevention

The effects of measurement variation on clinical decision making

Epidemiology of cardiovascular disease

RESEARCH ACTIVITY

Principal Investigator: CREDIBLE (ColoRectal cancer Early Diagnosis, Information Based Local Evaluation) funded by the National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative (NAEDI) July 2011 to June 2013.

Theme lead for cardiovascular disease prevention in the NIHR funded Birmingham and Black Country Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (BBC-CLAHRC) Oct 2008 to Oct 2013.

Deputy Director of Birmingham and Black Country Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC)

Co-investigator on the PolyIran study – the world’s first full scale clinical trial of polypill for cardiovascular prevention. This cluster randomised controlled trial is taking place in North East Iran.

Research collaboration with Isfahan Cardiovascular Research Centre on analysis of the Isfahan Cohort Study.

• Honorary Consultant in Public Health at Sandwell Primary Care Trust
• Chair of the EPIC-Cegedim Scientific Review Board (an electronic primary care database company).
• Collaborative links to MSDi and Health Intelligence (software companies working with electronic primary care databases)

Marshall T, Taylor B, Hothersall, E, Perez-Martin L. Plagiarism: a case study of quality improvement in a taught postgraduate programme Medical Teacher 2011; [In press]

Marshall T, Lancashire R, Sharp D, Peters TJ, Cheng KK, Hamilton W. The diagnostic performance of scoring systems to identify symptomatic colorectal cancer compared to current referral guidance Gut 2011 (Online 25th Feb 2011: doi:10.1136/gut.2010.225987)

Talaei M, Sadeghi M, Marshall T, Thomas GN, Kabiri P, Hoseini S, Sarafzadegan N. Impact of metabolic syndrome on ischemic heart disease – a prospective cohort study in an Iranian adult population: Isfahan Cohort Study Nutrition, Metabolism and Cardiovascular Diseases 2010 doi:10.1016/j.numecd.2010.08.003

Pennant M, Davenport C, Bayliss S, Greenheld W, Marshall T, Hyde C. Community Programs for the Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease: A Systematic Review American Journal of Epidemiology 2010; 172 (5): 501-516. doi: 10.1093/aje/kwq171

Marshall TP. Targeted case finding for cardiovascular prevention. British Medical Journal 2010; 340:1376.

Malekzadeh F, Marshall T, Pourshams A, Gharravi M, Aslani A, Nateghi A, Rastegarpanah M, Khoshnia M, Semnani S, Salahi R, Thomas GN, Larijani B, Cheng KK, Malekzadeh R. A pilot double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trial of the effects of fixed-dose combination therapy (“polypill”) on cardiovascular risk factors International Journal of Clinical Practice 2010 Published Online: Jul 13 2010 3:19AM DOI: 10.1111/j.1742-1241.2010.02412.x

Warren RE, Marshall T, Padfield PL, Chrubasik S. Variability of Office, 24-hour Ambulatory and Self-Monitored Blood Pressure Measurements British Journal of General Practice 2010 Sep;60(578):675-80.

Marshall T. The effect of blood pressure and cholesterol variability on the precision of Framingham cardiovascular risk estimation: a simulation study Journal of Human Hypertension 2010; 24, 631–638. [http://www.nature.com/doifinder/10.1038/jhh.2009.114]