SIR David Haslam CBE
Agent: Juliet Pickering
Assistant: Finlay Charlesworth
Biography: Sir David Haslam is an author, writer and healthcare policy consultant, and former Chair of the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE). He is also former President and former Chairman of Council of the Royal College of General Practitioners, former President of the British Medical Association, and former vice-chairman of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, and Professor of General Practice at the University of Nicosia, Cyprus. He was a GP in Ramsey, Cambridgeshire, for over 35 years and has been an expert member of the NHS National Quality Board, and National Clinical Adviser to both the Care Quality Commission and the Healthcare Commission
He is a Fellow of the Royal College of GPs, a Fellow of the Faculty of Public Health, a Fellow of the Academy of Medical Educators, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Medicine, and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians.
David has written fourteen books, mainly on health topics for a mainstream readership, which have been translated into thirteen languages. He has also written more than two thousand articles for medical and popular press. He regularly appears as an expert on BBC and national radio. He has been a conference keynote speaker in thirty-three different countries, and has been named by both Debretts and the Sunday Times as one of the 500 most influential and inspirational people in the United Kingdom. He was awarded CBE in 2004 for services to Medicine and Health Care, knighted in 2018 for services to NHS Leadership, and has been awarded Honorary Doctorates by Birmingham University and the University of East Anglia.
David’s last book, SIDE EFFECTS: How Our Healthcare Lost Its Way – And How We Fix It, was published by Atlantic in 2022. It was a Waterstones Popular Science Best Book of the Year, and a Book of the Week in the Observer, who called it “the real deal, a superb analysis of the thorny, intractable, endlessly sidestepped issues that bedevil 21st-century healthcare… [a] brilliant book.”
SIDE EFFECTS: HOW OUR HEALTHCARE LOST ITS WAY - AND HOW WE FIX IT
Non-fiction, 304 pages, Atlantic, 2022
With a single drug in the UK currently costing GBP340,000 per patient per year, or a gene therapy in the USA being costed at $1.2million, who should get such treatments, and how can we begin to afford them? Should we all be entitled to timely mental health therapy? How should we care for our old?
As we grapple with the world's worst pandemic for a century, our minds are on our health more than ever. But what should we rightfully expect of doctors? In this original and thought-provoking book, Sir David Haslam explores what good healthcare should achieve and asks how we pay for it. Informed by patient stories and data from across the world - from US big pharma to Britain's NHS - this is an urgent and often moving examination of our most important asset: our health.