News

Professor Sally Baldwin - 1940 to 2003

Professor Sally Baldwin, former director of the Social Policy Research Unit (SPRU) at the University of York, has died in an accident in Rome, aged 63. 

She was killed after a travelator she was standing on at a railway station in Rome collapsed trapping her in the machinery.

She spent 30 years at the SPRU, half of them as director, a post she held from October 1987 to January 2002.  Under her leadership, the unit doubled in size and developed a national and international reputation for its research on social security, disability and carers. Her pioneering book, 'The Cost of Caring: Families with a Disabled Child' (1985), helped to get the costs of childhood disability recognised in the benefit system.

Her research covered such diverse topics as the delivery of services and benefits to disabled people and their family carers; resource allocation, outcomes and the cash and care mix in social care; gender issues in social and health care; and the utilisation of research findings by policy makers and professionals.

Long before it was fashionable to talk about 'joined-up' policy and practice, Professor Baldwin argued that it was important to recognise that people's lives do not divide up into the neat segments of professional and organisational boundaries. But perhaps the defining focus of her research was on identifying the needs, views and preferences of the beneficiaries and recipients of service provision.

Sally Baldwin was a member of the NHS research and development commissioning panel for research awards in primary care. She was also a trustee of the Family Fund, and a non-executive director of York NHS Trust. In 1999. She was elected as a founding academician of the Academy of Learned Societies of the Social Sciences.

Peter Kemp
Director, Social Policy Research Unit
University of York