Jo Adu was brought up in the British colony of Ghana, receiving his secondary education at a very traditional British-model boarding school. In 1963 he came to the UK to study Medicine at Cambridge, with clinical years at University College Hospital in London. Following house jobs posts included the renal unit in Cambridge, and general medicine and the renal unit in Oxford. He then returned to Ghana’s medical school as a lecturer in medicine for 5 years, where he developed clinical nephrology and wrote an MD The pattern of acute renal failure in Ghana.
He returned to the UK in 1978 to train in nephrology at Guy’s Hospital with Stewart Cameron and Chisholm Ogg. It was a tremendous academic-clinical environment, but one thing that stuck out to him was the degree of team working, and how patients were kept at the centre of concerns.
In 1981 he was appointed consultant nephrologist at QE Hospital, Birmingham, joining Jonathan (later Sir Jonathan) Michael, another Guys-trained nephrologist who had been appointed the year before to establish a renal service.
Funds were shorter in Birmingham than London, and it was a time-consuming political as well as clinical battle to expand services adequately. Follwing experience at Guys, and noting reports from Kings, they were keen to remove barriers that were driven by funding rather than potential benefit. Introducing PD helped, as much of the costs could come from a different funding stream. A notable battle was to permit patients with diabetes to receive dialysis:
I remember one interview on Radio 4 when I said that I was sending a patient with diabetes and end-stage renal failure, who I was not allowed to dialyse, home to die. This was so she could be with her guide dog.
I was inundated with calls from the Regional Health Authority, and by the end of that morning had been permitted to dialyse her. I had prised open the great British secret, in that she received dialysis so her guide dog would not grieve!
Jo was central to setting up CAPD, and Birmingham was the first centre to establish a satellite haemodialysis unit, in Hereford, then a second at Aston. Eventually they had 11. But from the outset he was also given research space, pursuing immunology and genetics. This grew, and a hub of expertise in vasculitis developed too.
Following retirement from the NHS he returned to his native Ghana, and played a key role as leader and mentor in the development of nephrology there, and as a driving force for renal research in Africa. He has been central to studies of ApoL1 epidemiology in Africa as well as providing clinical input and training.
Jo was the first Black consultant nephrologist in the UK. He has notably sanguine views on how relevant this has been to his career. His thoughts are presented as one of several personal views on culture, race, and discrimination.
In 2023 he was awarded an honorary DM at which he spoke to the first graduates of the new Aston Medical School (illustration above). In 2024 he received the inaugural Lifetime Achievement award from the UK Kidney Association at their annual meeting in Edinburgh.
John Feehally and Neil Turner
Last Updated on September 12, 2024 by neilturn