Hazardous Hospitals is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship, exploring the history of safety in the British National Health Service. It is being conducted by Dr Christopher SirrsLink opens in a new window.

It may seem a strange principle to enunciate as the very first requirement in a Hospital that it should do the sick no harm.

- Florence Nightingale, Notes on Hospitals (1863)

For further information about the project, please click on the links in the menu above.

A surgical operation to reconstruct a patient’s anterior cruciate ligament. Drawing by Virginia Powell, 1996. Wellcome Images.

Joint Memorandum of the Medical Defence Union and Royal College of Nursing, 'Safeguards against failure to remove swabs. etc. from patients', 1969. TNA MH 150/296

'The Health Service Ombudsman for England – Can the Health Service Ombudsman Help You?', brochure, 1984. TNA JA 440/6/2

Hazardous Hospitals: Cultures of Safety in NHS General Hospitals, c.1960-Present is a Wellcome Trust Research Fellowship, grant number 219756/Z/19/Z.