Dr Ian London

After qualifying from St Thomas's Hospital Medical School, London in 1990 and completing my junior hospital posts in the southwest of England, I was accepted onto the King’s College Hospital Gastroenterology Registrar training rotation in the southeast of England. I was appointed to the post of Clinical Lecturer at Liverpool University where I worked for three years from 1996, supervised by Professor Jonathon Rhodes. I developed a passion for clinical gastroenterology and endoscopy working in the Royal Liverpool University Hospital and also in developing systems and processes to provide patients with the best possible care. In 1999 I was appointed to the post of Consultant Gastroenterologist at the Mid Cheshire Hospitals Trust in Crewe. I soon developed a viral liver service treating hepatitis B and C patients and also worked to improve alcohol services, pathways for IBD and a new nurse-led iron deficiency anaemia clinic. I became Clinical Lead in Gastroenterology and Endoscopy for the Trust and subsequently was appointed to the post of Clinical Director and Lead Colonscopist to the Cheshire Bowel Screening Program. As the first Clinical Director of the Cheshire Bowel Screening Program, I helped set up this new flagship regional cancer screening service. I continued to further improve the quality of this service while gaining experience caring for and treating gastroenterology and general medical inpatients and also complex speciality patients. Continuing with a strong interest in endoscopy and its therapeutic applications (gastroscopy, flexible sigmoidoscopy, enteroscopy, colonoscopy, ERCP), inflammatory bowel disease, irritable bowel syndrome, food intolerance, coeliac disease, rectal bleeding/piles, upper GI bleeding and dyspepsia/Barrett's oesophagus. After 16 years of consultant experience I moved in 2015 to my current NHS consultant gastroenterologist post at the Countess of Chester Hospital, where I am helping to support and develop a much larger team of gastroenterologists, surgeons, interventional radiologists and specialist nurses working together to provide a 24 hour 7 day a week out of hours gastrointestinal bleeding service for our patients in Cheshire. This will help to ensure high quality care with rapid treatment of patients presenting with unstable gastrointestinal bleeding preventing delays or the need to transfer patients off site for their urgent treatment. We are also building a regional IBD service that is improving the quality of care and also our accessibility via an IBD helpline to allow us to deliver responsive high quality care to patients in Cheshire with Crohn’s disease and ulcerative colitis. I continue to teach at the Mersey School of Endoscopy as this helps to ensure I keep up to date in this fast-moving area of my practice and pass on some of the experience I have gained to speciality medical trainees.  I am one of four regional endoscopy trainers visiting trainees in their own Hospital units.

Inflammatory bowel disease (IBD); Dyspepsia; Indigestion; Helicobacter pylori infection; Reflux dyspepsia; Irritable bowel syndrome (IBS); Constipation; Post-infective diarrhoea; Food Intolerance; Coeliac disease; Crohn’s disease, including strictures and fistulas; Ulcerative colitis; Microscopic colitis; Jaundice. Liver and Pancreatic Disease; Non-alcoholic fatty liver; Alcoholic liver disease; Haemochromatosis; Viral and Auto-imune liver disease; Anaemia; Investigation and treatment of iron deficiency anaemia. Bowel cancer screening; Rectal bleeding and band ligation of haemorrhoids (piles); Optimising thiopurine use, azathioprine, 6-mercaptopurine, mycophenolate; Anti-TNF biologics, Infliximab, Adalimumab, other biologics; Vedolizumab, Ustekinumab, JAK-2 inhibitors eg: Tofacitinib for UC. Digestive endoscopy; gastroscopy, enteroscopy, flexible sigmoidoscopy, colonoscopy.