Nigel Crisp

Edmund Nigel Ramsay Crisp, Baron Crisp (born 14 January 1952) is a crossbench member of the House of Lords where he co chairs the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health. He works and publishes extensively in global health and international development. He was a British senior civil servant in the Department of Health, public policy analyst, and Senior Manager in the NHS. He was awarded a life peerage upon retirement.

Crisp is married with two children, He was replaced by Sir Ian Carruthers, as acting NHS Chief Executive, and Hugh Taylor, the Director of Strategy and Business Development, as acting Permanent Secretary.

The Kings Fund has reported that during Crisp's tenure the English NHS began the greatest improvement in its history. Major reforms were introduced including patient choice, the engagement of the private sector, nurse prescribing and much more. Major service improvements also began.

Service improvements by the end of 2005 included 99% of patients being able to see a GP within two working days, 99.8% with suspected cancer saw a specialist within 2 weeks, 99% of women with breast cancer began treatment within 4 weeks of referral, and the A and E target of everyone seen or admitted within 4 hours was exceeded with 99% doing so.

Surgical waiting times fell to a maximum of 6 months for admission and 3 months for an outpatient appointment (with only 12 patients waiting longer than this for admission to English hospitals and 18 waiting longer for an outpatient appointment). In 2000 some patients had been waiting more than two years for admission. Activity levels increased at the same time with admissions up 16% in five years to 10,050,000 by March 2005 and A and E attendances up 27% to 16,712,000. He has also argued that there are lessons from the period which it is vital to learn in 2024 in order to revive the NHS.

In 2016, a biography of Tony Blair – Broken Vows: Tony Blair, The Tragedy of Power by British author Tom Bower, reported Ken Anderson's comment "Crisp had no control over costs and didn’t have a clue what to do", following the former's investigation into why the NHS accounts were six months late. Bowers describes that after an assessment by management consultants McKinsey & Company, Tony Blair and Secretary of State for Health Patricia Hewitt decided Crisp should be replaced, and part of the method used to induce Crisp to resign at age 54 was to award him a life peerage.

Global health and international development Nigel Crisp has been very active in global health and international development since 2006; most notably publishing in 2007 Global Health Partnerships - a report for the prime minister on what more the UK can do to support health improvement in developing countries; co-chairing, with Commissioner Bience Gawanas of the African Union, a Task Force on scaling up the education and training of health workers on behalf of the Global Health Workforce Alliance which resulted in the publication of Scaling up, Saving lives in 2008; and founding, with the Zambian Ministry of Health, The Zambia UK Health Workforce Alliance in 2009.

He writes and speaks widely on global health and his book Turning the world upside down - the search for global health was published in 2010. It described what richer countries could learn about health from people in low- and middle-income countries and argued for greater partnership and mutual learning between countries. The book proved very influential. A second edition was published in 2022. As Patron of THET (The Tropical Health and Education Trust) he has continued to develop and support partnerships around the world.

In 2018 he founded and subsequently co-chaired with Sheila Tlou, the former health minister of Botswana, Nursing Now. Nursing Now was designed to raise the profile and status of nurses globally and was very successful with 126 countries joining the campaign with more than 750 national, regional and local groups active when it concluded in May 2021. It was succeeded by the Nursing Now Challenge which aims to provide leadership development opportunities for 100,000 young nurses and midwives globally. See https://www.nursingnow.org/

He chaired Sightsavers International from 2007 to 2013, is a vice-chair of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Global Health, is a Senior Fellow of 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.

Honours He was appointed Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath (KCB) in the New Years Honours 2003.

Books Crisp N. Health is Made at Home, Hospitals are for Repairs; Salus, 2020 Crisp, N. Turning the world upside down - the search for global health in the 21st Century, CRC Press, 2010 Crisp, N. 24 hours to save the NHS: The Chief Executive's account of reform 2000 - 2006, Oxford University Press, 2011 Crisp, N. & Omaswa, F (ed.) African health leaders: Making change and claiming the future, Oxford University Press, 2014 Crisp, N. Turning the world upside down again - Global health in a time of pandemics, climate change and political turmoil , CRC Press, 2022

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