Professor Sir John Edward Tooke FRCP FMedSci is the Inaugural Dean of the Peninsula College of Medicine and Dentistry, and of the Peninsula Medical School which was its first constituent. He is currently the Head of the University College, London School of Life & Medical Sciences.
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Tooke graduated in Medicine from St John's College, Oxford in 1974 and went on to become a Wellcome Trust Senior Lecturer in Medicine and Physiology and Honorary Consultant Physician at Charing Cross and Westminster Medical School before moving to the Postgraduate Medical School of the University of Exeter in 1987. His clinical and research interests are in diabetes and Vascular Medicine, and he built an internationally recognized research team in these areas at Exeter. In 1998 he led the bid for the development of the Peninsula Medical School and was appointed its Inaugural Dean in 2000. Tooke also successfully led the bid for the creation of the Peninsula Dental School, of which he is the inaugural Executive Dean.
Tooke was knighted in the 2007 New Years Honours List for Services to Medicine.
On June 30, 2009, it was announced that Tooke will join University College London as Vice Provost (Health), Head of the UCL School of Life & Medical Sciences and Head of the UCL Medical School[1]
Tooke led the inquiry into Modernising Medical Careers (MMC), the new and current post-graduate training structure for medical doctors in the UK. MMC has become extremely unpopular amongst the majority of medical professionals in the UK, and as a result the Government set up an independent inquiry into the situation. Tooke's report strongly criticises the UK Government's handling of the MMC implementation. The "Tooke report" suggests scrapping MMC and starting with a new system which is based on extensive consultation with medical professional bodies and practitioners. Tooke's report has been uniformly welcomed by the medical establishment, the majority of whom are keen to bury MMC.
Despite the widespread acknowledgement that the Tooke report addresses several flaws in the government's reforms of medical training, the UK Department of Health's response to the Tooke report suggests that the department does not want to see it fully implemented. The Department's response accepts only a quarter of the Tooke review's recommendations, and attempts to resist the remainder in varying degrees. This response is regarded as inadequate by many in the UK medical professions.