BSG Elected Councillor, June 2023 - 2026

Dr Matthew Cowan first realised that medical education would be an important part of his professional career upon qualifying in 1998 when he discovered that the attributes that had won him preclinical and clinical prizes at St George’s Hospital Medical School were not actually those that make a good doctor. Following SHO posts at the Hammersmith Hospital and inspired by a consultant mentor, he trained in gastroenterology with a hepatology interest in and around London including time at the liver units of King’s College, The Royal Free, St Mary’s and St George’s. Noticing a real clinical problem, he underwent an NIHR Fellowship developing AI models to spare patients with poor treatment outcomes undergoing long courses of toxic antiviral therapy for hepatitis C. He completed his PhD thesis in the same month that the first directly acting antiviral agents were licensed, rendering his work obsolete. In 2012 he had the same feeling as in 1998 when he found that his registrar training had taught him good clinical skills but little else that he needed for life as a consultant at Surrey and Sussex Healthcare NHS Trust. Over the last decade, his clinical focus has been to develop a hepatology service for local patients. Following his appointment as Training Programme Director for the newly formed Kent, Surrey and Sussex gastroenterology rotation and more recently with his national role as Chair of the BSG Training Committee, he has sought to address some of the structural challenges in postgraduate medical education to create more relevant training for aspiring gastroenterologists. He firmly believes that all of our patients have something unique to teach us but that it takes skill, experience and often humility to find out what this is.