Professor Jane Blazeby

Jane Blazeby FMedSci is Professor of Surgical Research at the University of Exeter and an Honorary Consultant Surgeon at Royal Devon University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and at Bristol NHS Foundation Trust. She studied Medicine at the University of Bristol and undertook higher surgical training in the South West of England before gaining an MRC Clinician Scientist award in 2000 at the same time as she started as a upper gastro intestinal cancer surgeon in Bristol and senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. She was Professor of Surgery at the University of Bristol between 2006 and 2026. Her MD (1993 to 1995) funded by a regional NIHR personal fellowship involved developing a patient reported outcome measure (PROM) with the European Organisation for Research and Treatment of Cancer (EORTC) for oesophageal cancer. This began her interest in patient centred surgical care and standards of surgery. She has developed and validated with the EORTC Quality of Life Group an international portfolio of PROMS which are widely used in clinical trials in surgical oncology and she chaired the group for 3 years. Her PROM expertise seeded an interest in randomised trials and methodological research. She was part of the original IDEAL (Idea, Development, Exploration, Assessment and Long-Term Follow up) activites at Balliol Colleage in 2009 that developed the IDEAL framework for the evaluation of surgical innovation. Also that year she began directorship of an MRC Hub in Trials Methodology Research which ran for a decade. The MRC Hub developed and tested in collaboration with surgeons, methodologists, trialists and patient partners a wide range of innovative methods to optimise the design and conduct of surgical trials. At the same time the Royal Collge of Surgeons (RCS) Trials initiative began and Jane established and led the RCS Surgical Trials Centre in Bristol. The RCS initiative and the advanced methods developed at that time have been widely implemented in many surgical trials. She has supported many new Chief and Principal investigators to gain funding and lead surgical trials and invested extensively into academic surgeons and methodologists in studies to evaluate surgery. This is in addition to conducting major surgical trials herself as a CI. This has led to a culture change and the UK is now world leading in randomised trial design and conduct.

In the past decade her interest has extended to early phase surgical research and innovation. She led and co-led the Surgical Innovation theme of the Bristol Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) (2016 to 2022) and (2022 to 2026). She now leads the NIHR Surgery and Peri-Operative Care Translational Research Collaboration. The new TRC includes 16 Biomedical Research Centres. It is working to improve the number and quality of early phase studies in this field and to generate a workforce with this expertise. Jane has been building collaborations with the National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and the Health Research Authority as well as with multiple surgical innovators. This has allowed her to explore the current practice of innovation and raise awareness of the key governance and methodological issues that now need addressing. She has also starting working with the NIHR James Lind Alliance (JLA) initiative to optimise how JLA research priorities may be targetted onto BRC and early phase studies - something which she hopes will improve the end-user focus on translational research. 

She remains an active member of the COMET (Core Outcome Measures in Effectiveness Trials) management group and the Trials Methodology Research Partnership. She is an emeritus NIHR Senior Investigator.