A doctor from Penzance has been head-hunted to offer clinical leadership to the NHS Covid Testing Programme.

Most recently he has been supporting the Government’s Events Research Programme (ERP), a team dedicated to running pilot events including music festivals, Wimbledon, Silverstone and the Euro 2020 games at Wembley.

Dr Matthew Boulter, a partner at Atlantic Medical Group at the St Clare Medical Centre, was also tasked by the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) to provide clinical oversight for testing at the G7 summit. His scientific background and leadership experience sees him sitting on a number of advisory panels with some of the leading academic and scientific figures involved in the national pandemic response.

Matthew said: “Sometimes being located where we are, it can feel a little bit forgotten when it comes to involvement on national-scale projects. However, that obviously wasn’t the case not too long ago when we successfully hosted the G7 in Cornwall.

"I’m proud to be representing our great county, as well as primary care and GPs more generally when it comes to the work I’ve been doing with the DHSC.”

Since last summer, Dr Boulter has split his time between his usual GP role and working on various testing programmes, including those which helped university students get home for Christmas last December.

More recently he has been a key advisor on the ERP. The role of the ERP has been to investigate how events with larger crowd sizes could safely return without social distancing, while limiting the transmission of Covid-19 as much as is practically feasible.

Matthew added: “It seemed clear to me at an early stage that we needed to treat the pilot events as formal research studies and present detailed findings that could help us learn from a whole range of sporting, arts, business and music events. It’s been fantastic to see the levels of co-operation from everyone involved.

"Hopefully the work of the ERP will continue to support the return to normality which can allow us to get back to the types of activities that so many of us love doing.”

The ERP has just released data drawn from 37 trial events, over a four month period, which it said showed that case numbers were largely in line with or below community infection rates for the duration of the research programme.