Allyson Pollock: Tackling risks and harms

Biography

Allyson Pollock champions the NHS ideal of universal healthcare free at the point of use, and her research challenges current moves that undermine it. Most recently, she has shown how the Health and Social Care Act 2012 is reducing the NHS to “a public funding stream and a logo.” Her critical analyses of the private finance initiative (PFI) did much to discredit this fashionable method of financing investment: she noted that its costs were exorbitant and that claims of shifting risk to the private sector were spurious. She is professor of public health at Newcastle University and director of its Institute of Health and Society. Her research on children’s sports and school rugby has shown that their risks and harms are unmonitored and largely unacknowledged.