Michael Dixon

Michael Dixon (age 70–71)^[1] LVO, OBE, FRCGP, FRCP is an English general practitioner and current Head of the Royal Medical Household.^[2] He is Chair of The College of Medicine and Integrated Health and Visiting Professor at the University of Westminster.^[3]

Career

Dixon studied psychology and philosophy at the University of Oxford before studying medicine at Guy’s Hospital. 

He has worked as an NHS GP at College Surgery in Cullompton for 40 years. In 2007, College Surgery became part of the Culm Valley Centre for Integrated Health and is rated by the Care Quality Commission as 'excellent'.

For 18 years (1998-2015), Dixon was Chair of NHS Alliance representing primary care commissioners. Its mission was to provide a voice for general practice and its patients in planning local hospital and community services.

He has been active in the commissioning movement since the early 1990s, when he co-founded the Mid Devon Family Doctors Commissioning Group.^[4] He sat on the National Executive of the National Association of Commissioning GPs (NACGP), founded in 1993, and was a co-writer of its document "Restoring the Vision" (1997), which was commissioned by the then Minister of Health, Alan Milburn.^[5] When NACGP became NHS Alliance in 1998, he was elected Chairman and has continued in this role by annual election until he announced his retirement in 2015.^[6] He is a frequent speaker and national advisor on GP commissioning and co-author of a number of books and chapters in this area (such as The Locality Commissioning Handbook)^[7] and A Practical Guide to Primary Care Groups and Trusts.^[8]

His national appointments have included membership of the National Leadership Network for Health and Social Care, the National Stakeholder Forum and National Steering Group for GP Commissioning. He was an Honorary Senior Fellow in Public Policy at HSMC University of Birmingham,^[9] and also an Honorary Senior/Lecturer in Integrated Health at the Peninsula Medical School.

Past ministerial appointments include Chair of the NHS LifeCheck Board and Practice Based Commissioning Advisor to Lord Darzi. He is a past President of the Health Writers Guild^[9] and was previously Senior Advisor of the King's Fund and Steering Group member of the King's Fund Enquiry on General Practice.^[10]

In 2010, he became Chair of The College of Medicine, which emphasises the importance of health and healing beyond medicines and interventions and which includes social prescribing, lifestyle interventions and complementary and traditional approaches. He was a commissioner and health lead for the Healthy Cities Report launched in the House of Lords in 2022 and was appointed to the Health Council of Reform Think Tank involved in its "Reimagining Health Programme".

He was listed in the top ten most influential clinical leaders in the Health Service Journal 2013.^[11] He has been listed among Pulse magazine's most influential GPs for several years^[12] and was also a medical columnist for SHE Magazine.

Social prescribing

He has pioneered social prescribing in his Devon GP practice for several years,^[13] promoting it as an answer to over-medicalisation and soaring health costs. Social prescription facilitates patients with a range of social, psychological and physical problems to access a wide range of local interventions and services provided by the voluntary and volunteer sectors and others.

^[14] In 2015 he co-founded the National Social Prescribing Steering Group, which he co-chairs.^[15] This leads a network created in 2016, which currently has over 3,000 members active in social prescription.

In 2016, he was appointed the first National Clinical Champion for Social Prescription (NHS England) and he is an Ambassador for the Global Social Prescribing Network.

Complementary medicine

Dixon's other main field of interest is complementary medicine. Co-author of The Human Effect (Radcliffe Press 2000), he believes in "patient centred medicine" and the role of the patient in self healing. Reviewing the book, David Short, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Medicine at the University of Aberdeen writes

the authors urge doctors to move beyond the idea of the body as a machine. If doctors do indeed regard their patients in this way, then this book is timely. One cannot help feeling that what is advocated is really a return to best practice of family doctors of an earlier generation. Perhaps the authors recognise this in saying 'what is called for is less of a revolution and more of a revival'.^[16]

Dixon describes his approach to medicine in the BBC Radio 4 programme Healthy Visions,^[17] which especially focuses on prevention and looking at the whole lives of patients.^[18] He argues that it is beneficial to "break down the boundaries" between orthodox and complementary medicine, and argues that an increasing number of GPs are doing so.^[19]

In a paper for the British Journal of General Practice, The physician healer: ancient magic or modern science?,^[20] he writes

it seems that the physician healer is now poised to rise again like a phoenix, not on a wave of nostalgia, but because modern science demands it. Placebo research and psychoneuroimmunology are beginning to clarify a role in which caring is no longer an act of compassion or indulgence but has everything to do with curing or in the preferred modern term 'effectiveness'.^[21]

He was the medical director of The Prince's Foundation for Integrated Health, which closed in 2010 after its finance director was arrested for stealing £253,000 from the organisation.^[22] Dixon is a director of The College of Medicine which opened in 2010^[23][24] with former Chair of the General Medical Council Sir Graeme Catto as its President.

Dixon has been criticised by professor of complementary medicine and alternative medicine campaigner Edzard Ernst for advocating the use of complementary medicine. Ernst said that the stance of the NHS Alliance on complementary medicine was "misleading to the degree of being irresponsible."^[25] Ernst had previously been sympathetic to building a bridge between complementary and mainstream medicine, co-writing an article with Michael Dixon in 1997 on the benefits of such an approach.^[26] Ernst and Dixon wrote that

missed diagnoses by complementary therapists giving patients long term treatments are often cited but in the experience of one of the authors (MD) are extremely rare. It can also cut both ways. A patient was recently referred back to her general practitioner by an osteopath, who was questioning, as it turned out quite correctly, whether her pain was caused by metastates. Good communication between general practitioner and complementary therapist can reduce conflicts and contradictions, which otherwise have the potential to put orthodox medicine and complementary therapy in an either/or situation.

In December 2023, it was reported that Dixon had been appointed by Charles III as the Head of the Royal Medical Household a year previously in 2022, a decision which was criticised by campaigners against alternative medicine.^[27][28]

Personal life

In his free time, Dixon gardens and fishes whenever possible. His wife, Joanna, is a professional artist and they have three children, two of whom are GPs and the other working in health and science policy.

Honours and appointments

• LVO (2015)
• OBE (2001)
• Former Visiting Professor University College of London
• Visiting Professor Westminster University
• Former Honorary Senior Fellow, HSMC Birmingham University
• Former Honorary Senior Lecturer Peninsula Medical School, Exeter
• Medical Advisor to Charles, Prince of Wales (2002-2022)
• Head of The Royal Medical Household (since 2022)^[2]

Publications

• The Locality Commissioning Handbook (Radcliffe Press 1997),
• The Human Effect (Radcliffe Press 2000)
• A Practical Guide to Primary Care Groups and Trusts (Radcliffe Press 2000)
• Practice-based Commissioning: From good idea to effective practice 2007
• Co-author of many NHS Alliance documents including Implementing the Vision (2000) and Vision in Practice (2002), Breaking Boundaries (2012) and Think Big, Act Now (2014). He has written a number of original research papers mainly covering areas of general practice.
• Time to Heal: Tales of a Country Doctor (Unicorn Publishing Group 2020)

References