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.
