Recently appointed consultants Dr Anisa Jafar (emergency and paediatric emergency medicine) and Mr Anthony Howard (trauma and upper limb surgery) will help to embed clinical research in acute care as part of the Cenect team. Both have completed NIHR clinical lecturer programmes and also hope to support the development of academic trainees.
Dr Jafar holds an honorary clinical lectureship at The University of Manchester’s Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute; sits on the Royal College of Emergency Medicine’s research and global emergency medicine committees and is a MERIT doctor. Her research interests span access-, resource- and context-limited emergency care, whether that is humanitarian response and disaster medicine; development of systems in low resource settings; or refugee and asylum seeker healthcare. She supports work in areas such as Pakistan, Ghana, Ethiopia and Palestine.
In 2019 she founded the Global Emergency Care Collaborative (www.geccouk.com) which recently joined the WHO Acute Care Action Network. Through GECCo, Dr Jafar has led several small research teams to deliver predominantly qualitative studies in various aspects of global emergency care.
Mr Howard is an academic orthopaedic surgeon specialising in shoulder and elbow trauma/instability and complex upper limb reconstruction. His research focuses on mechanism-based reconstruction, complication reduction, and pragmatic trial design in orthopaedic trauma and upper limb surgery. He leads NIHR Global Health and SICOT-funded programmes examining access to trauma care across sub-Saharan Africa and holds honorary senior lecturer appointments at Groote Schuur Hospital/University of Cape Town.
He has held NIHR Academic Foundation posts throughout his training, including Academic Clinical Fellow and Academic Clinical Lecturer posts at Leeds Teaching Hospitals, and more recently, working at Oxford Clinical Trials Units, NDORMS Oxford. He has played a leading role in major NIHR portfolio studies, including SPiRIT, START:REACTS, and BIG BOSS trials, with total competitive grant income exceeding £1.5 million as principal investigator or co-applicant.