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Dr Rupert Whitaker is founder and Chairman of the Tuke Institute, an international think-tank that promotes standards in medicine and medical science. He was one of the founders of Terrence Higgins Trust a charity set up to provide direct services for people with HIV and to advocate on their behalf . Dr Whitaker has worked in the fields of medicine and community advocacy for almost 30 years. As someone living with HIV for almost 30 years he has been a tireless campaigner for people with HIV and chronic illnesses and has appeared on television and in the news-media with his personal and professional experiences.

Early life

Born in 1963, the son of a publisher, Whitaker was educated at Lord Wandsworth College, Hampshire, from which he graduated in 1980. He came out as gay at school in 1978. Prior to leaving Lord Wandsworth, he was offered and declined a conditional music scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, and, in 1981, he attended St. Hild and St. Bede College, Durham University. It was whilst he was there that his partner Terry Higgins died from an AIDS-related illness. Whitaker became ill himself and was allowed to transfer to Bedford College in the summer of 1982, London University, to read psychology; at that time, he was not expected to live longer than a year.

Community Advocacy and the Terrence Higgins Trust

In 1982, immediately after the death of Terry Higgins, Rupert Whitaker was one of a group of Terry’s friends who began to raise awareness and funds in Terry’s name in order to address the developing problem of what was then called Gay-Related Immune Deficiency (GRID); HIV still had not been identified. He and Martyn Butler—the person who originally thought of the idea for the Trust—took part in a conference on the problem of ‘GRID’, organised by Gay Switchboard, London, which was also attended by Tony Whitehead. This marked a turning point in the development of the Trust. With a new group of people, Rupert Whitaker continued this work. Seeing the Trust through its registration as a charity, he helped to set up the educational, mental health, and buddying services, and to speak to the media on the topic. Following the completion of his undergraduate degree in 1984, Whitaker accepted a scholarship to the University of Toronto in order to train in the field of psychiatry and particularly clinical science related to HIV. Terrence Higgins Trust is now the leading HIV charity in Europe.

Training and Practice

Dr Whitaker undertook 14 years of university education and training in the UK, Canada, and the USA. Following a year at the University of Toronto, he was named a University Scholar at Boston University for five years in the nationally prestigious University Professors Program and was also awarded a national American fellowship in psychiatric public health. These awards paid for his doctoral studies. He received his doctoral qualifications in psychiatry, neurology, and immunology with distinction—a 100% grade point average— and this was followed by three post-doctoral Fellowships in HIV immunology and psychiatry at Tufts New England Medical School, University of Michigan Medical School, and the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine. Dr Whitaker is a specialist in biobehavioural medicine and chronic illness and has also worked in public health and health services research. During his post-doctoral studies, Dr Whitaker lead the international response to anti-HIV immigration laws in the USA and elsewhere, based on his published research in public health and social justice.

Personal Health

Following his third post-doctoral fellowship, at the age of 30, Dr. Whitaker was assaulted and reinfected with a virulent strain of HIV and was diagnosed with AIDS within a few months. Shortly afterwards, he also suffered a stroke, which left him with visual, speech, cognitive, and mobility problems, requiring brain surgery, which left him with epilepsy. This was followed by a number of years of intensive rehabilitation. At the age of 37, he returned to Europe part-time and, at the age of 41, he suffered a further, initially life-threatening illness. The illness became a chronic neurological disorder, the nature of which was not diagnosed after two years of NHS care. Dr. Whitaker was treated at the Institute of Neurology, London, where he was eventually accused of making the illness up. With the help of friends, he then flew to the USA where the illness was diagnosed within ten days as a rare side-effect of a class of HIV medications interacting with his existing brain-injury. He was treated and, within a further fortnight, was back to his previous level of health. As a consequence of this experience, he founded the Tuke Institute.

The Tuke Institute

The Tuke Institute is an independent think-tank of international scientists, clinicians, and other professionals founded by Dr. Rupert Whitaker in 2007. It aims to promote standards and methods in the practice of medicine and medical science with the primary aim of making them help ill people to get well and to prevent malpractice. Primary methods include promoting the measurement of outcomes from the patient’s perspective, measuring the quality of individual clinician’s performance, and promoting public participation in audit and governance of services . It defines medicine in terms of what ill people need in order to get well as opposed to what just physicians do, and promotes a biopsychosocial framework for treatment with integrated and nurse-led practice. On the basis of this initiative, Dr. Whitaker was an Expert Adviser to the Department of Health in 2009-10. The Tuke Institute is considered to be a culminating focus for Dr. Whitaker’s experience as a clinician, scientist, and patient himself.

External links

• Dr. Rupert Whitaker's page on the Tuke Institute Website[1]