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Asset Name:
E010792 - Jefferis, Anthony Faulkner (1949 - 2025)
Title:
Jefferis, Anthony Faulkner (1949 - 2025)
Author:
Martin Bailey
Identifier:
RCS: E010792
Publisher:
The Royal College of Surgeons of England
Publication Date:
2025-09-05
Description:
Obituary for Jefferis, Anthony Faulkner (1949 - 2025), Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.
Language:
English
Source:
IsPartOf Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Date of Birth:
30 April 1949
Place of Birth:
Wivelsfield Sussex
Date of Death:
24 July 2025
Place of Death:
Oxford
Occupation:
Titles/Qualifications:
MB BChir Cambridge 1973

FRCS 1979

MChir

MEd 2010
Details:
Anthony (‘Tony’) Faulkner Jefferis was a consultant otolaryngologist at Heatherwood and Wexham Park hospitals. He was born in Wivelsfield, Sussex, the son of George Morrey Jefferis, an Army officer, and Eleanora Louise Jefferis née Fast. Tony’s early schooling was in Newcastle and Malaya, before he attended Brighton, Hove and Sussex Grammar School. In 1967 he went up to Cambridge to read medicine at Emmanuel College and, following clinical studies at St Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, he qualified in 1973. After house officer posts at St Thomas’ and the Royal Berkshire Hospital, followed by a post in the casualty department at St Thomas’, he took up a short service commission in the Royal Army Medical Corps. In the Army he completed vocational training for general practice, serving in the Joint Headquarters at Rheindahlen, West Germany. He subsequently undertook core surgical training at the Queen Elizabeth Military Hospital, Woolwich and at Musgrave Park Hospital, Belfast. He began ENT training on secondment as a senior house officer in Brighton. On leaving the Army, he was appointed as an ENT registrar at the Royal Free Hospital, and after gaining the final FRCS, became an ENT senior registrar at St Mary’s and Royal Marsden hospitals. In 1984 he spent six months as a TWJ Foundation research fellow at the University of California, San Francisco. During his senior registrar years, he managed to fit in a master of surgery thesis on phototherapy of tumours in the tongue and larynx in an animal model, for which he was awarded a Cambridge MChir. In 1985 he was appointed as a consultant otolaryngologist, head and neck surgeon at Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust. There he led the group which raised charitable funds to build the John Lister postgraduate medical centre in the early 1990s. He set up one of the UK’s first one-stop neck lump clinics, using ultrasound and fine-needle aspiration cytology to reach a diagnosis in a single visit. Above all, he was a congenial colleague who went out of his way to create a harmonious department. Tony became passionately involved in surgical education, becoming an associate (later deputy) postgraduate dean in the Oxford Deanery in 1996 and head of the Oxford Postgraduate School of Surgery in 2007. Latterly he became a senior fellow in surgical education in the Nuffield department of surgery and coordinator of the Oxford University Global Surgery Group, with which he remained active until the time of his death. He undertook multiple teaching visits to Africa, Israel and Gaza. Among the many courses he organised, he was especially proud of the five Balliol colloquia in surgical education, which he ran between 2008 and 2012. He completed an MEd in surgical education in 2010. In 1974 Tony married Jane Stagg, who was a physiotherapist at the Middlesex Hospital: they had three children, Tim, Olly and Jo, who have produced seven grandchildren between them. A committed Christian, Tony was a lay minister and contributed actively to his local church throughout his life. He was very fit and enjoyed hiking, belonging to several mountain walking groups of varying ability, which he would characteristically urge to new heights. Always interested in new adventures, he took three months off to join the 1997 Peking to Paris Motor Challenge, which ended in a serious crash in northern India, from which he fortunately emerged largely unscathed. A keen cyclist, he recently embarked on a series of long-distance cycle rides between England’s cathedrals. Tony had a gift for strategic thinking and inspiring others, coupled with great self-confidence and unbounded optimism. He died in Oxford from a type A aortic dissection on 24 July 2025 aged 76. He will be much missed.
Sources:
University of Oxford Nuffield Department of Surgical Sciences 27 August 2025 www.nds.ox.ac.uk/news/mr-tony-jefferis – accessed 3 September 2025.
Rights:
Copyright (c) The Royal College of Surgeons of England

Image Copyright (c) Image reproduced with kind permission of the Jefferis Family.
Collection:
Plarr's Lives of the Fellows
Format:
Obituary
Format:
Asset
Asset Path:
Root/Lives of the Fellows/E010000-E010999/E010700-E010799
Media Type:
JPEG Image
File Size:
106.90 KB