Professor Peter McCulloch

Peter was appointed Reader (Assistant Professor) in surgery at University of Oxford in 2004, and full Professor in 2013. He graduated from Aberdeen University and underwent surgical and academic training in Glasgow, before becoming Senior Lecturer at Liverpool University in 1992. Peter has a major interest in the problems of clinical research in surgery and in other complex treatments requiring adaptation to each patient and/or acquired practitioner skill.  He has published extensively on the difficulties of doing RCTs in these areas and was the driving force behind the IDEAL Framework and Recommendations.  These attempt to provide an integrated evaluation pathway for complex interventions by using different approaches to fit each stage of the intervention life cycle, analogous to the Pharma Phase 1 – 4 trial paradigm.  

Peter is the past chair of the IDEAL Collaboration, an initiative to improve the quality of clinical research in surgery and other complex treatments.  In recent years IDEAL has published guidelines on evaluating healthcare AI (DECIDE-AI) and holistic evaluation of robotic surgery (Nature Medicine, Jan 2024).  Peter is a strong advocate of evidence-based surgery and therefore apt to challenge some of the claims of the robotic surgery industry.  He is currently working on a project to rationalize HTA evaluation of all digital health technology within the EU.