Tom Wingfield

I am a physician and academic clinical lecturer in infection who has worked as a doctor and investigator in the UK, sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, and muddy fields at Glastonbury and Reading Festivals.

My research interest is in addressing the social determinants of health, with a focus on tuberculosis. During my PhD in Peru, I worked with 32 impoverished shantytown communities in north Lima, Peru, to improve TB prevention and control. My research found that accessing even free TB care was expensive and developed a threshold above which such costs were "catastrophic" to TB patients, leading to abandonment of treatment or even death. The catastrophic costs threshold was endorsed by the World Health Organisation in their 2015 global End TB Strategy and I continue to work with WHO on task forces concerning social protection, catastrophic costs, and TB.

Working with the Innovation For Health and Development team (Imperial College London, UK), I
led the Household Randomized-controlled Evaluation of a Socioeconomic Intervention to Prevent TB (HRESIPT). This research showed that socioeconomic support including conditional cash transfers improved rates of TB preventive therapy uptake and increased TB treatment success. This work has been published in high impact journals including the Lancet, won the Academy of Medical Sciences Young Investigator Award 2017, and was selected to be presented at the competitive US-CDC late breaker symposium at the International Union Against TB and Lung Disease.

In addition to ongoing work in Peru, I am expanding my research further as a post-doctoral investigator to evaluate the best methods of delivering socioeconomic support to TB-affected households in diverse low-resource settings including Nepal, Vietnam, Mozambique, and South Africa through funding from the Wellcome Trust, Academy of Medical Sciences, University of Liverpool, Liverpool Glasgow Wellcome Centre for Global Health Research, and Swedish Health Research Council.

In the near future, I hope to broaden my research to create innovative socioeconomic interventions which go beyond TB to improve the health, wellbeing, and quality of life of impoverished people in low-resource settings.