Sad announcement of the death of Professor Pippa Tyrrell
It is with great sadness that we share the news of the death of Pippa Tyrrell, emeritus Professor of Stroke Medicine at the University of Manchester and retired consultant in stroke medicine at Salford Royal.
After studying medicine at Cambridge and London, Pippa trained in general medicine and neurology and completed her MD in dementia research. She was appointed as the first consultant in stroke medicine at Salford Royal in 1995, where she set-up the first dedicated stroke service in Manchester.
Over the next few years she worked tirelessly to transform the provision of stroke care across the region and always recognised the value of multi-disciplinary care to meet the needs of patients. She was passionate about teaching and also developed a thriving research portfolio, becoming the first Professor of stroke medicine at the University of Manchester. During her distinguished career, Pippa held numerous senior leadership roles in research and also clinically, and was a Trustee and Medical Vice Chair at the Stroke Association. She was awarded an MBE in recognition of her services to stroke care and research.
Many of you will have worked with Pippa over the years; she was a staunch supporter and great friend to the network. She significantly influenced the development of our centralised hyper acute model and continued to support improvements after it was fully implemented in 2015.
In our early years as a network, she led work on stroke prevention and used her considerable experience to help us shape our new model for integrated community stroke services. She was always on hand to offer wisdom and advice, and such was her influence, that we created an outstanding achievement award in her honour. Until very recently, she was always delighted to judge our poster competition and present her award at our annual conference. She is pictured here in 2022 having bestowed awards to her colleagues Dr Paula Beech and Lorraine Azam.
Pippa will be remembered as a kind, compassionate doctor, teacher, researcher and friend who had the needs of her patients at the forefront of everything she did. She inspired a generation of clinicians and researchers and her legacy is the continued excellence of stroke care and flourishing portfolio of stroke research across Greater Manchester.
Our Manager Sarah Rickard reflected: “I always think of Pippa as the Grandmother of stroke. She was an inspiring female leader, who remained humble and importantly very kind. She will be missed but her legacy in stroke lives on.”
Our sincerest condolences are with her husband Anthony, and children Caitlin, Toby and Olivia.