Rupert Whitaker

Background

About Rupert Whitaker

When I’m asked what I do, I reply that, though I’m a senior clinician and scientist, my real expertise comes from my extensive experience as a patient. Over the last 40 years I’ve been treated for HIV, a stroke, a heart-attack, cancer, major depression, and, following brain-surgery, epilepsy. On three occasions I’ve been given less than six months to live, but with a potent mix of skill, determination, and luck, I’m still here. That combination of expertise and patient-experience has created a deep insight that informs my work advising health-services on how to help patients get well and stay well. I’ve been a staunch advocate for people with terminal and chronic illness since the death of my partner Terry from AIDS when I was 19; I then co-founded the Terrence Higgins Trust, Europe’s first and now leading HIV and sexual health charity. Afterwards, I trained for 14 years in biobehavioural medicine and science, eventually becoming an expert medical witness internationally, and having over 80 publications, most as first author. Later, I founded the Tuke Institute to challenge medical services to stop simply prescribing pills and waving patients out a revolving door, and instead to help us get well and stay well, moving from an expensive, physician-centred disease-service to an effective, patient-centred health-service, with (safe) public and patient participation as a keystone. One of my most valued skills is translating complex issues into measurable solutions, pulling apart the traditional and re-forming it into something that’s not just workable, but works for every patient. When you work from the patient outwards, solutions look very different — and become far more effective. Finding creative solutions means overturning the assumed and joining up the pieces in a brand new way. It’s not rocket-science but advanced health-science informed by clinical expertise and very hard-won, lived experience. Media-activities: since 1983, I have been a focus of over 40 profiles and TV programmes on HIV and public health, including a 2011 profile in the Guardian newspaper (UK) and a 1992 televised debate on the McNeil-Lehrer News Hour (US) with Assistant US Secretary of State for Health and Human Services Philip Lee and Republican Senator William Dannemeyer on health-related immigration-policy.