Founder and Patron

Professor Sir Eldryd Parry studied medicine at Cambridge and Cardiff and was seconded from 1960 to 1963 to University College Hospital, Ibadan, Nigeria. In January 1966 he returned to Africa at Haile Sellassie I University, Addis Ababa, and left in 1969 to take the Chair of Medicine at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria, Nigeria. In 1977 he became the Foundation Dean of Medicine at the University of Ilorin, Nigeria, where he introduced a radical community-based programme, COBES. From 1980 to 1985 he was Dean and Professor of Medicine at the now Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana. 

He was senior editor of Principles of Medicine in Africa until 2009 (4th Edition, Jan 2013). He was an Honorary Fellow at Cardiff, Emmanuel College Cambridge, the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, the Royal College of Surgeons of England, the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Ghana, and a Foundation Member of the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery of Amoud University, Somaliland.   

He was given a lifetime achievement award by the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene in 2007. He received the OBE in 1982 and was appointed KCMG in 2011. 

In 1988 he founded THET, which he chaired until 2007 and remained actively involved with until his death in 2022.  

Lord Nigel Crisp is an independent crossbench member of the House of Lords, since 2006, where he is Vice Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Global Health. 

He was previously Chief Executive of the English NHS and Permanent Secretary of the UK Department of Health where he led major reforms between 2000 and 2006. 

Lord Crisp is a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, an Honorary Professor at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and a Foreign Associate of the US National Academy of Medicine. He was formerly a Distinguished Visiting Fellow at the Harvard School of Public Health and Regent’s Lecturer at Berkeley. 

His publications on global health include Turning the world upside down – the search for global health in the 21st Century; Global Health Partnerships; One World Health – an overview of global health after Global Health Partnerships; and, edited with Francis Omaswa, African Health Leaders – making change and claiming the future. He described his time as Chief Executive of the NHS in 24 Hours to Save the NHS – the Chief Executive’s account of reform 2000 – 2006.  

Lord Crisp became THET’s inaugural Patron in December 2018 and has been supporting the work of THET since 2009.