Nigel Crisp
 Lord Nigel Crisp is an independent crossbench member of the House of Lords and works mainly on international development and global health. From 2000 to 2006, he was both Chief Executive of the NHS, the largest health organisation in the world, and Permanent Secretary of the UK Department of Health and led major reforms in the English health system.
His latest book 24 Hours to Save the NHS - the Chief Executive's Account of Reform 2000 to 2006 tells the inside story of the NHS Plan reforms 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 will be published at the end of January 2010. It takes further the ideas about mutual learning between rich and poor countries that he developed in his 2007 report for the Prime Minister – Global Health Partnerships: the UK contribution to health in developing countries – and shows how this will shape healthcare in the future.
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. It published its report, Scaling up, Saving Lives, which advocated practical ways to increase massively the training of health workers in developing countries, in May 2008.
He followed this up by founding 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 proposals in the Task Force report and assist the Zambian Government to increase the numbers of health workers trained in the country.
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.
He is a member of the Health Worker Migratory Advisory Council, a Champion Advocate for the Global Health Workforce Alliance and an Advisory Board Member of the African Centre for Health and Social Development. He also chairs Sightsavers International, is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Cambridge Massachusetts, an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and an Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge and of the Royal College of Physicians.
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