Ara Warkes Darzi, Baron Darzi of Denham (Armenian: Արա Վարդգես Դարզի; born 7 May 1960) is an Armenian-British surgeon, academic, and politician.
Lord Darzi is an academic surgeon and holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College London, specialising in the field of minimally invasive and robot-assisted surgery, having pioneered many new techniques and technologies. He is co-director of the Institute of Global Health Innovation and the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre at Imperial College London. He has tried to reform the National Health Service (NHS) in England and is recognised internationally as an advocate for applying innovative reforms to health systems globally.
Until resigning the whip in July 2019, Darzi sat as a Labour member of the House of Lords, but now sits as an independent peer because of his belief that Jeremy Corbyn failed to control antisemitism within Labour.
Darzi was born in Baghdad, Iraq to Armenian parents displaced by the 1915 Armenian genocide. His family had lived in Erzurum, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey). His paternal great-grandparents, Tatyos and Elbiz Shiroian, had one daughter and four sons. Of them only Elbiz and her daughter, Arevalous (Darzi's grandmother), survived the genocide. They fled on foot to northern Iraq with the aid of a friend of Tatyos. Darzi's father was born in Mosul and his mother was born in Baghdad.
Darzi is fluent in Armenian and served as a choirboy for Armenian religious services, growing up in Baghdad . He was educated at Baghdad College, but the situation in Iraq in the late 1970s led to his family's emigration. At 17, he moved to Ireland to study medicine, while his parents and sister eventually settled in London. "We were refugees. We had thrived in Iraq. But it was quite clear that we had to move on again. The first Persian Gulf war was looming. I remember my father saying: 'The kids need to get out of here,'" Darzi recalled in 2015.
He studied medicine at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, obtaining the degrees of LRCP&SI MB BCh BAO in 1984, and went on to gain the postgraduate degree of MD at Trinity College Dublin. He also gained a Fellowship of the Royal Colleges of Surgeons (being those of England, Ireland, Edinburgh, and Glasgow).
In 1990, Darzi moved from Ireland to Britain to further his career in surgery. In 1991, aged 31, he was appointed as a consultant surgeon at Central Middlesex Hospital and in 1994 moved to St Mary's Hospital, London and also joined Imperial College London, where he was appointed a Professor in 1996. He was promoted to Chair of Surgery and Head of Department in 1998. Darzi holds the Paul Hamlyn Chair of Surgery at Imperial College and the Institute of Cancer Research. He is also an honorary consultant surgeon at St Mary's Hospital and the Royal Marsden Hospital. He has held many senior administrative appointments within the Faculty of Medicine at Imperial College, Research Council, Editorial Board of Scientific Journals, and medical royal colleges.
He holds the fellowship of the American College of Surgeons and has been elected as a fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences, an honorary fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering and more recently a foreign associate of the Institute of Medicine. From 2005 to 2008, he was president of the Bath Institute of Medical Engineering (BIME).
Darzi's main clinical and academic interest is in minimally invasive surgery and allied technologies in which he and his team are internationally recognised. He leads a team of researchers covering a wide spectrum of engineering and basic sciences research topics including Medical Image Computing, Biomedical Engineering, Clinical Safety, surgical education and training at post-graduate and undergraduate levels and robotics. He has published more than 800 peer-reviewed papers and authored, co-authored or edited several books.
This work has received international recognition including the Queen's Anniversary Prize for Excellence in Higher and Further Education 2001, Hamdan Award for Medical Research Excellence in 2004. In 2006, Darzi and his department were awarded the Rector's Research Excellence Award for their work on surgical robots.
Darzi is an enthusiastic advocate of Patient record access arguing that interested patients and carers, especially those accustomed to self-management of their condition, should take the lead in creating apps and other means of accessing records that are customised to the needs of patient groups.
In December 2006 NHS London asked Darzi to "develop a strategy to meet Londoners' health needs over the next five to ten years" and so his report Healthcare for London: A Framework for Action was published on 11 July 2007. Largely implemented, it recommended the development of academic health science centres and the introduction of more primary services in one place: polyclinics. The plan for moving care from hospitals to GP-led polyclinics was not successful. Nick Clegg called it "the central imposition of a polyclinic on every primary care trust, regardless of the geography, demographics and clinical needs of the area". However, his call for trauma, acute stroke and heart attack services to be centralised in specialist units succeeded and has been widely copied.
He was also the National Advisor in Surgery to the Department of Health. Darzi's report in this role, 'Saws and Scalpels to Lasers and Robots: Clinical case for change' (April 2007), argued for a change to the way surgery is organised to maximise patient benefits.
Darzi was granted a life peerage on 12 July 2007, taking the title Baron Darzi of Denham, of Gerrards Cross in the County of Buckinghamshire and joining the House of Lords. On 29 June 2007 Prime Minister Gordon Brown appointed him as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department of Health. His appointment was a small part of a political shift by government to incorporate more talents, with historical predecessors such as the Ministry of All the Talents.
Darzi was tasked with leading a national review to plan the course of the NHS over a decade, reporting to the Prime Minister, Chancellor, and Secretary of State for Health in June 2008. He cooperated with the Department of Health to undertake the "NHS Next Stage Review".
Darzi was quoted in The Times as saying that "...This Review should be both clinically-led and evidence-based". The final report of the Review, High Quality Care for All, was published in June 2008 to considerable public and academic acclaim. The Financial Times stated that it was "the world's most ambitious attempt to raise the quality and effectiveness of an entire nation's healthcare". The Lancet said that:
Darzi has wisely thrown out regulation as the organising principle of the NHS. He has replaced it with quality... This cultural shift is a radical re-visioning of purpose for the NHS—away from the political command and control of processes and towards professional responsibility for clinical outcomes
Through High Quality Care for All, academics suggested that Darzi has updated traditional notions of professionalism and described a new accountability in clinical practice. Following publication, Darzi remained in his ministerial post. He was associated with the plan to develop Polyclinics in England. The plan for moving care from hospitals to GP-led polyclinics was quietly reversed when the costs became apparent, but his call for trauma, acute stroke and heart attack services to be centralised in specialist units was seen as successful and was widely copied.