Described as “a troublemaker of the very best kind”, the health activist Jean Robinson, who has died aged 95, championed the rights of patients, pregnant women and disadvantaged people for more than 50 years. She was chair of the Patients’ Association, president of Aims (the Association for Improvements in Maternity Services) and a lay member and outspoken critic of the doctors’ regulatory body the General Medical Council. In 1988 she wrote the explosive booklet A Patient Voice at the GMC, laying bare its inadequacies and contributing to its reform.
Robinson’s activist career took off in 1966, when, living in Oxford and looking after her young son, she was invited to become a lay member of the regional health board. She was not prepared to be a rubber stamp appointment and said the board statistician nearly fell off his chair when “the token housewife” came to his office with detailed questions about perinatal mortality rates.
Robinson always worked in a voluntary capacity and had no clinical or social care background. But that gave her independence to scrutinise healthcare decisions and champion patients. She said: “I am always concerned about people who think they can make decisions about other people’s lives. In politics we have had a degree of democracy, whereas in education, medicine and healthcare we have not had any power from the bottom.”
She was passionately keen to educate herself about the workings of the regional health board. Armed with a medical dictionary and library card, she read voraciously, scrutinising even the driest hospital management circular. Condescending officialdom infuriated her and the more she found out about how healthcare was run in her patch, the more she felt obliged to speak out, calling out, for example, the way children living with Down’s syndrome were closeted away in an old-fashioned asylum.
Robinson at home while chair of the Patients’ Association. She spent three years answering hundreds of complaints each week from the public. Photograph: Oxfordshire Heritage Archive
She was not afraid to antagonise colleagues. In fact, in 1973 Richard Crossman, the Labour secretary of state for health, asked to meet her, saying: “I’ve never in all my public life seen so much pressure to get rid of anyone. They absolutely hate you.” They had a good exchange and Crossman did not sack Robinson, but as she had been on the health board for seven years she decided to leave and take up a new challenge.
She then joined the Patients’ Association, which had been set up in the wake of the thalidomide scandal. The founder wanted to retire, so Robinson became its chair. She spent the next three years answering hundreds of complaints each week from the public. Many were from new mothers. Robinson said: “Letters about birth leapt off the page.” In the 1970s, 60% of women were given an oxytocin drip to induce labour, which caused severe and sudden contractions. It could be very traumatic, inducing a form of shell shock. Robinson set out to study the research underpinning this practice. She found one main study, carried out in Glasgow, was on far too small a sample. The researchers wanted to see if inducing births could reduce the rate of stillbirth and gave oxytocin to 100 women, comparing them with others receiving standard care.
However, the rate of stillbirth at this time in Glasgow was three in 1,000, so such a small study could not prove anything. Robinson wrote to the Lancet medical journal pointing out this, along with many other flaws. To sceptical detractors who thought her letter was drafted by an obstetrician, Robinson retorted: “No doctor has written it for me. All I needed was a Bodleian reader’s card and letters from 400 women who have had induced labour.”
When young widows had a higher risk of cervical cancer, it was presumed it was because they swiftly took new sexual partners. But Robinson posed the question “Who gets widowed early?” It was often wives of men in occupations such as construction, mining or asbestos, and as she pointed out, women’s exposure to carcinogenic chemicals could have played a part.
In 1975, when her term as chair of the association ended, Robinson joined Aims as its honorary research officer. It was a role she said fitted her like a glove, combining taking calls on the helpline with writing summaries of the latest obstetric research in plain English for its quarterly journal. Listening to distraught new mothers on the phone every day opened her eyes to mental health issues.
She persuaded the Department of Health to recognise suicide as a key cause of maternal death and the letter she wrote with Beverley Beech in 1987 to the British Journal of Psychiatry about nightmares after childbirth is credited in medical literature as the first identification of postnatal PTSD. Robinson also challenged routine episiotomies and championed women threatened with removal of their babies, exposing the fact that social services had targets to increase adoptions.
In 1979 Robinson was appointed a lay member of the General Medical Council, where she heard cases on the professional conduct committee. She was shocked that the public were so poorly served. For example, GMC rules allowed only eight weeks to complain about a GP, starting from the event, not from the time the person was aware of a problem. If a woman with a breast lump was not examined properly by her GP, for example, it might take her months to realise the lump was growing, by which time the deadline would have expired.
In 1988 Robinson wrote A Patient Voice at the GMC, described as “a remarkable insider’s account”. It detailed all the problems, explaining why three-quarters of complaints submitted were not even heard. Meeting her, the Conservative secretary of state for health Kenneth Clarke said the booklet was rather critical and winked: “I’m not opposed to that.” The booklet fuelled a growing clamour for change. Pressure from politicians, the British Medical Journal and others, as well as events such as the Bristol heart scandal in the 1990s, eventually brought about major changes at the GMC.
Robinson providing an illustration for a Daily Herald article by Marjorie Proops during her time there as a typist. Photograph: Daily Herald
She was born in Southwark, London, the second of three children of Charles Lynch, a clerk at Tate and Lyle, and Ellen (nee Penfold). When the second world war broke out in 1939, Jean and her two brothers were evacuated to Somerset, and 18 months later to Cornwall. When she returned to London in 1945, her parents urged her to do a secretarial course so she might get a white-collar job. While she was on the course, she joined the Labour League of Youth, much to the disappointment of her working-class Tory parents. But, she said: “From the earliest age I was interested in people being less privileged and that something should be done about it.”
She got a job at the Daily Herald, a national Labour newspaper, and then became secretary to the MP Geoffrey de Freitas, who encouraged her, aged 23, to apply to Ruskin College in Oxford to do a two-year diploma in politics, history and economics. She savoured the chance to learn. Entering the Bodleian library for the first time, she said: “I felt overwhelmed with riches. If you’d put me in a room full of jewels, it could not have matched what I felt.” Halfway through the course, she spent a year as an exchange student at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she studied American politics.
While at Ruskin College, she met the labour market economist Derek Robinson, whom she married in 1956. The couple adopted Toby in 1965, had a daughter Lucy four years later, and made their home in Oxford. She got a secretarial job at the market research company Nielsen, which led to work with the Oxford Consumers Group. However, she discovered job opportunities in Oxford were scarce and volunteering could be the route to much more interesting work, so in 1966 she agreed to be a lay member of the regional health board.
As well as her work at the GMC, Robinson remained involved with Aims, and was elected its president in 2010, retiring only in 2018. From 1995 to 2006 she wrote a column for the British Journal of Midwifery, giving midwives an insight into issues from a user’s perspective, and in 1997 she was made a visiting professor at Ulster University, giving lectures on medical ethics. She was also a trustee of a women’s refuge in Oxford.
Derek died in 2014. Robinson is survived by Toby and Lucy, four grandchildren, Al, Sean, Stevie and Vegas, and two great-grandchildren, Cassius and Vida.
Jean Robinson, medical activist, born 17 April 1930; died 4 June 2025