Nigel Crisp

Nigel Crisp is an independent member of the House of Lords and co-chairs the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. He works and writes extensively on global health issues.

His latest publications are:

African Health Leaders – making change and claiming the future which he co-edited with Francis Omaswa. Most books on health in Africa are written by Europeans and Americans. This redresses the balance and contains accounts from 23 African health leaders – 13 men and 10 women from 14 countries and 3 generations – about how they have let change in their own countries. It was published by OUP on September 15th 2014. More details.

The Future for Health – everyone has a role to play the report of the Gulbenkian Commission on Health which he chaired and which was published on September 23rd 2014. This calls for a new Compact for health in Portugal with the focus on action by citizens and society and a transition from today’s hospital-centred and illness based system where things are done to or for a patient to a person-centred and health based one where citizens are partners in health promotion and health care. More details at www.gulbenkian.org.uk.

Global Supply of Health Professionals written with Lincoln Chen which examines both the numbers of health professionals, the demand and the dynamics of the current situation. It was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, 370;10 March 6 2014.

From 2000 to 2006 Nigel Crisp was Permanent Secretary of the UK Department of Health and Chief Executive of the English NHS – the biggest health organisation in the world with 1.3 million employees – where he led major reforms. He described these in 24 Hours to Save the NHS - the Chief Executive's account of reform 2000 to 2006 and draws out the lessons for the future. He argues that furter radical reform is needed if the NHS is to remain affordable and sustainable and that other countries can learn from the experience in England.

His earlier book Turning the world upside down - the search for global health in the 21st Century provides an overview of global health and describes what richer countries can learn about health from low and middle income countries - without richer countries' resources and vested interests many countries are innovating and developing effective new approaches. It takes further the ideas about mutual learning he developed in his 2007 report for the Prime Minister, Global Health Partnerships and shows how this will shape healthcare in the future.

He has a particular interest in human resources and partnerships. In 2007 he co-chaired an international Task Force on increasing the education and training of health workers globally with Commissioner Bience Gawanas of the African Union. Its report, Scaling up, Saving Lives, sets out practical ways to increase the training of health workers in developing countries.

He subsequently founded the Zambia UK Health Workforce Alliance with Dr Velepi Mtonga, the Honourable Anderson Chibwa, Dr David Percy and Susana Edjang in 2009 in order to implement some of the Task Force proposals and assist the Zambian Government to increase the numbers of health workers trained in the country.

Nigel Crisp chairs Sightsavers International, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and has many other affiliations.

A Cambridge philosophy graduate, he worked in community development and industry before joining the NHS in 1986. He has worked in mental health as well as acute services and was from 1993 to 1997 the Chief Executive of the Oxford Radcliffe Hospital NHS Trust, one of the UK’s leading academic medical centres.

Lord Crisp is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health, an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, and Ambassador for the eHealth Foundation and a Foreign Associate of the Institute of Medicine.

He is a special adviser to KPMG's Global Healthcare Centre of Excellence.