Professor Sir Brian Jarman

Brian Jarman was the Head of the Department of Primary Health Care and General Practice and Head of the Division of Epidemiology, Public Health and Primary Care, Imperial College School of Medicine until October 1998 and remains within the Division, in an Emeritus capacity,
where he heads the Dr Foster Intelligence Unit. He read Natural Sciences at Cambridge and did a PhD in Geophysics at Imperial College and then worked for Shell as an exploration geophysicist in the Sahara (Libya) and elsewhere. After changing to medicine he did his MBBS at St Mary's Hospital Medical School and an exchange at Harvard Medical School. His hospital posts included St May’s Hospital and the Beth Israel Hospital, Boston as a medical resident. He has worked on the development of socio-economic indicators of health status eg the Under-Privileged Area (UPA) score, on the provision of beds in London and on hospital standardised mortality ratios (HSMRs). He advised a number of countries (including Brazil, Gibraltar, Greece, Costa Rica, Cyprus) on development of their primary care services. He was a Member of the London Strategic Review Panel, set up to advise the Department of Health on the development of hospitals, medial education and research needs of London which reported in February 1998 and in 1999-2001 he was a panel member of the Bristol Royal Infirmary Inquiry. From November 2001 he has worked with Don Berwick at the Institute for Healthcare Improvement in Boston, MA, USA and now works there on a part-time basis. He was President of the British Medical Association (2003-04). Recent work has involved calculating adjusted hospital death rates in England, Scotland, USA, Canada, the Netherlands and Sweden plus a range of primary care health services research at Imperial College Faculty of Medicine.