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Dr Chris Sirrs, CHM postdoctoral researcher, has had a chapter he has written with Martin Gorsky at the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine, published in the latest volume of the Yearbook for the History of Global Development.

This is based partly on research he undertook at the World Bank archives in Washington DC and interviews with former Bank staff and explores the rationale behind the Bank’s controversial promotion of user fees for health services from the 1980s. The chapter is published open access.

Full citation: Martin Gorsky and Christopher Sirrs, ‘The World Bank’s Advocacy of User Fees in Global Health, c.1970–1997: More Ideology than Evidence?’, in Health and Development, ed. Iris Borowy and Bernard Harris, Yearbook for the History of Global Development 2 (De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2023), 277–316, https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/9783111015583-011/html

Wellcome Trust-funded postdoctoral researcher Dr. Chris Sirrs has been cited in the latest ‘National State of Patient Safety Report’, drawn up by the Institute of Global Health Innovation at Imperial College London. The authors have drawn upon Chris's NHS patient safety timeline in exploring the historical background to patient safety in Britain.

This report regularly informs debates both within the health service and in Parliament.

Dr Christopher Sirrs, CHM Research Fellow, will be speaking at the Thackray Museum's prestigious Annual Insights Lecture Series, on the topic Insights: Hazardous Health through History on Saturday, 5 November at 10:00am.

He will be exploring the history of patient safety in the NHS, explaining why a systemic focus on the prevention of harm to patients – despite the ethical injunction for clinicians to ‘do no harm’ – only evolved surprisingly recently in the history of medicine.

Please to find out more information and to sign up to attend.