Prof. Adaeze O. Nwankwo

Clinical writing is written from the bedside outward.

Adaeze Nwankwo qualified in medicine from the University of Ibadan in 2007 and completed postgraduate training in internal medicine at the National Hospital, Abuja, where the general medical take — and the diagnostic pressure it applies — shaped what became a career-long interest in how clinical judgement is formed and taught.

Appointed Consultant Physician at the University Teaching Hospital in 2014 and Professor of Internal Medicine in 2019, the work has run along two tracks that feed one another: an unbroken general medical practice, and the writing that has come out of it. The first textbook was written in response to a specific frustration — reference texts that assumed a formulary and a laboratory turnaround most of the region does not have.

A textbook that cannot be used on a Tuesday morning ward round is a literature review with a spine on it.

Eleven titles have followed, each written and revised against live teaching. Chapters are drafted from cases on the take, tested with registrars and final-year students, and rewritten where they fail to survive a real presentation. Four have been adopted as core texts across West African medical schools, and the diagnosis volume is now in its second edition in fourteen countries.

Alongside the writing, the academic work has centred on curriculum reform and assessment. As Chair of the Curriculum Review Committee at Lagos between 2021 and 2024, the undergraduate clinical programme was restructured around workplace-based assessment, and examiner training was formalised for the first time. Research output focuses on cardiovascular risk in West African populations, where the calibration of imported guideline thresholds remains an open and consequential question.

Teaching, clinical service and writing are treated as one body of work rather than three. Consultation and advisory sessions are offered on that basis — to registrars finding their footing, to research teams preparing a submission, and to faculties and hospital departments redesigning how they train and govern.