Who is sir donald acheson

Read about our fair use policy and why we are doing this. This website uses cookies We place some essential cookies on your device to make this website work. Set cookie preferences. Start new search Print Discovery help Bookmark. Browse by Records Creators Acheson, Sir Ernest Donald, , Knight, physician and epidemiologist This page summarises records created by this Person The summary includes a brief description of the collection s usually including the covering dates of the collection , the name of the archive where they are held, and reference information to help you find the collection.

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In the year he began work there had been 28 deaths from Aids, this increased to in two years, with 10, possible cases. He launched a huge publicity campaign in the media to educate the public in the perils of unsafe sex and to enlighten them that it was not just a disease confined to the gay community.

A reluctant Conservative government was persuaded to release extra funding and to turn a blind eye to illegal drug use so that needle exchanges could be set up. By the time that he retired in , the threatened epidemic had become a manageable chronic condition and the numerous hospital beds set aside for cases were redundant. In the first cases of new variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease appeared and he was belatedly informed by the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food that there had been an outbreak of BSE in cattle two years previously.

Under pressure to issue a public statement to the media on the subject, Acheson was reported as saying that there was no risk associated with eating British beef. Similar controversy arose over a remark he made on the day before he retired. At a press conference he said that breast self-examination was not an accurate method of detecting cancer, thereby completing contradicting the published government guidelines.

In the late s the Labour government commissioned him to write a report on inequalities in health care. Many of his 39 recommendations were implemented, such as more money for poorer families, restrictions on smoking in public places, more money for inner city schools and better sex education. Among his many other appointments, he was a member of the Wessex Regional Hospital Board from to , a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution from to , and of the General Medical Council from to She was a staff nurse at the Middlesex Hospital when they met.

It was a much longer explanation, but it was this nugget that was extracted by television news editors. There was a third unhappy part to his final years as CMO: serious attempts to cull his medical staff.

Historically within the Department of Health there were two parallel hierarchies: administrative staff who reported to the permanent secretary and medical staff to the CMO. This began in and by the early s the CMO had a staff of In a world of team medicine, this was questionable, but Acheson argued he could not have achieved his successful Aids campaign without them. But Whitehall efficiency reviews in the Thatcher years were unrelenting and merciless.

His successor, Kenneth Calman, declared himself sunk when the staff under him became merged. New Labour repaired some of the damage by the introduction of tsars for several important categories of patients. Of all his achievements — the founding of the new medical school at Southampton University, his research reports on the health hazards of asbestos and the desperate state of inner-city primary healthcare — Acheson would probably have been most proud of raising the profile of public health.

Both his father, a Northern Ireland doctor, and his older brother Roy, a Cambridge professor, were public health doctors. His last public service, for which he gained widespread respect, was his report on health inequalities in Recruited by New Labour after the election, he was given one year to review the current state of inequalities and set out priorities for future policies.

True to his reputation, he was on time and in a most thorough manner. Many have been implemented — money for poor families, a restriction on smoking in public places, more money for inner-city schools, better sex education — but some of the most crucial, such as reducing the incomes gap, remain to be done. Acheson was knighted in