Mark Ashworth: “cycling” GP and researcher who recognised the power of big data to transform healthcare

When Mark Ashworth began working as a GP in the Hurley practice in south London he was told that his predecessor, Montague Levine, described as the most colourful coroner in the country in his Telegraph obituary,1 went trout fishing on his day off. This did not appeal, so the young GP used his free sessions to do research instead.

Ashworth had been bitten by the research bug as a medical student when he discovered a new symptom of coeliac disease—delayed onset of shaving in adolescent boys2—and he saw in this diverse part of south London an ideal place to put research into practice.

Many of the patients he inherited from Levine were on benzodiazepines—it was routine at the time for them to be prescribed on discharge from hospital—and with colleagues at the Institute of Psychiatry Ashworth helped patients to withdraw with minimal intervention: just advice from the GP and a self-help booklet. Around 70% were able to withdraw without any symptoms, his study showed.3

He did further mental health research when he worked with two clinical psychologists to come up with a new way of measuring treatment outcomes. Initially he dismissed talking therapies as something for the chattering classes but scores from his Psychological Outcome Profiles (Psychlops) instrument4 soon …