Philip Newland Jones is a Consultant Pharmacist at University Hospital Southampton (UHS) and part of the Research Leaders Programme (RLP).

Philip is also Honorary Associate Professor in Diabetes and Endocrinology at the University of Southampton (UoS), and Clinical Director of the Diabetes and Endocrine service at UHS.

His research aims to improve care for people with diabetes, obesity and endocrine (hormone-related) diseases.

Growing the trials available to patients

Philip aims to use his RLP award to expand the number of trials that Southampton is involved in. This will increase the number of opportunities that patients have to take part in research, increasing early access to novel treatment mechanisms.

“My desire as a service is to grow our commercial portfolio for diabetes and obesity, as they are the two real opportunity growth areas for our service going forwards,” he says.

This will include trials of new medicines for diabetes. It will also include trials of new obesity medicines, to inform how they can be used cost-effectively in the NHS for maximum benefit.

Philip also aims to support his team to conduct their own research into endocrine diseases.

These include rare hormone-related diseases, such as Cushing’s disease and acromegaly. They also include cancers that affect hormone production, such as neuroendocrine tumours and adrenal cancers.

He says that, as a specialist tertiary centre, UHS is well placed to undertake these studies.

“We’ve got a unique cohort of people that are perfect for research,” he says, “which you just cannot get in many other centres.”

“It’s really important that we collaborate with other centres in research for these rare conditions. This helps to ensure we can collate and learn the natural disease progression and efficacy of current medical and surgical interventions.”

Developing his own research

Philip also plans to research ways to improve care for patients with diabetes during their stay in hospital. This could be for surgery or other treatments not related to their diabetes.

To do this, he intends to build on and strengthen his links with researchers at UoS and in the NIHR Southampton Biomedical Research Centre.

“I’ve got some really good collaborations that I’ve been working on over the last six to seven years,” he says, “with professors who have an interest in perioperative and inpatient diabetes research.”

Through his research, he aims to ensure patients’ diabetes is accounted for, and their care adjusted accordingly. This will help to reduce the risk of complications during their stay.

He is also looking to collaborate with other RLP awardees. These include Dr Cathy McKenzie and Dr Andy Fox in pharmacy. They also include people in other departments, such as Dr Stephen Lim.

Leading change

Since he started in his role, Philip has worked hard to build a research team. This includes nurses with specialist skills in diabetes and endocrine disease research.

On a number of occasions throughout his career, he has been told that certain opportunities were only available to medical professionals. However, he hasn’t let this stop him.

For example, a commercial company once said he was not eligible to become a Principal Investigator for a trial. Yet when he challenged this, they changed their position.

This has since enabled other healthcare professionals, in his team and externally, to follow in his footsteps.

“It enabled nurses and other healthcare professionals within community teams nationally to take on principal investigator roles for device trials, where there’s no reason it needed to be a physician,” he explains.

He feels very strongly that trials should be lead and supported by individuals with the competence and passion to do so. He believes the lead should not be pre-ordained depending on what your undergraduate training was.

During his RLP award, he intends to further develop his leadership skills in research. This will allow him to support his team to carry out more research and progress in their research careers.

“If I don’t do it, no one else necessarily will, he says, “and it opens the door for people behind me to pick up the baton and run further than I am able.”