My father, Jim Thomas, who has died of cancer aged 61, started out on his career in health and social care as a community nurse in East Anglia in 1986, and worked his way up to be head of workforce capacity and transformation at the charity Skills for Care, where he was employed from 2007 to 2022.
Throughout his career, Jim fought for people to have more control over their care, and he had a deep suspicion of authority and rules for the sake of rules. He was a lateral thinker who cut through the jargon and asked: what do people actually need?
As a young nurse, he was asked to convince an elderly man to move into sheltered housing. But he quickly realised that this man enjoyed living in his isolated countryside home with many cats, a long-drop toilet and a water supply from a nearby stream. To keep the authorities at bay, Jim persuaded the man to connect the house to mains water and get a flushable toilet and litter trays.
