An Oxford physician who looks after patients through emergency surgery, and explains medicine to 250,000 people online.
I’m Chief Resident on the Surgical Emergency Unit in Oxford, a physician working alongside the surgeons on the medical side of their patients’ care. That’s my full-time job. Around it, I teach Oxford medical students at Keble College and hold advisory and board roles in healthcare technology. I’ve also worked with FIGS, Elastoplast, Vaseline and The King’s Trust.
Brands and agencies can ask for my brand pack, and I’ll send it over.
I’m a doctor who also works in health communication, not the other way round. The people who follow me are listening to a doctor, so I work with established healthcare brands. I’d rather work with one for the long term than do a one-off post. I won’t promote supplements, or skincare creams and medical devices that have no evidence behind them.
I’ve been a non-executive director since 2024, and I hold board and advisory roles in healthcare technology now. What makes business sense doesn’t always make clinical sense.
The questions I ask are pretty basic. Who actually uses it? Does it make life easier for patients, and for the clinicians looking after them? You don’t need a business background to ask those. You need to have done a shift recently.
A product with a great business case that adds ten minutes to every patient on a ward round ends up in a cupboard. So if you’re building something for patients or clinicians, get a clinician involved early, not once it’s built and changing it costs a fortune.
In 2026 I built three medical education apps of my own with AI tools, and put them on the App Store. I wrote the clinical content, and caught a lot of errors the AI made.
How I built them, and what went wrong
I’ve looked at AI from the research side too. I co-authored a multi-centre evaluation of AI-assisted chest X-ray interpretation for pneumothorax, published in the Emergency Medicine Journal in 2024.
I’ll do documentaries, podcasts and longer interviews, where there’s time to get the medicine right. I work full time on a clinical rota, so short-notice live TV doesn’t work for me.
Send a media or podcast request
I’ve done various bits of media over the years, for outlets including the BBC and the Wall Street Journal.
The Terrence Higgins Trust invited me. I was part of a small group, with the charity’s patron Beverley Knight, for a half-hour discussion with Keir Starmer. That day he became the first UK Prime Minister to take an HIV test in public.
to now
The council helps guide TikTok’s policies on misinformation and medical content in the UK, and works with the Department of Health and Social Care. I think medical content can be a force for good, as long as the doctor posting it would say the same thing on the ward.
to
I was part of the UN-backed initiative against COVID-19 vaccine misinformation online.
I’m a physician on the surgical team. I look after the medical side of patients who come in acutely unwell under the surgeons, before and after any operation. That’s particularly people who are frail, or have a lot going on medically.
Surgery is becoming more complicated. Patients are becoming more complicated. We need surgeons doing the operating, and physicians dealing with everything else.
I qualified in 2015 and I’ve worked in Oxford pretty much my whole career, including two years in perioperative medicine and two in Same Day Emergency Care. Since 2023 I’ve been Chief Resident on the Surgical Emergency Unit, and its audit and quality improvement lead. Two changes did most of the work: point-of-care blood tests, and a senior deciding on imaging earlier. We now know sooner whether someone needs to be admitted. We presented our results at the ASGBI International Surgical Congress in 2025.
I’ve been Senior Medical Tutor at Keble College, Oxford, since 2019, and I take the college’s medical students for bedside teaching. Applying to medicine? My free interview guide is on the students page.
What I see on the surgical take, and what the evidence says about it.
If your trust has approved an AI scribe, use it. But don’t sign a note you haven’t read: it’s still your note, with your name on it.
The form comes straight to me, and so does email.
nathan.spence@medservicesuk.com
Based in Oxford.
