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.
In 1993 he pursued his desire to teach and became a trainer of care sector workers at Cambridgeshire county council. He moved into management in 2000, as the council’s head of workforce development for adult social care, and in 2002 became an expert adviser to the government taskforce set up to help deliver the vision of the Valuing People white paper, which aimed to improve the lives of people with learning disabilities.
Then Jim joined Skills for Care, and around 2011 devised the Community Skills Development project, which funded more than 30 small charities and community groups to look at how they could utilise the undervalued skills of everyday citizens to help people live independently. For example, could a supermarket worker who cares for a grandparent use their knowledge to help older customers with their shopping? Colleagues said the project was way ahead of its time.
After his diagnosis with cancer in 2022, Jim left Skills for Care, but was soon back riding long distances on his beloved bicycles, and he set up a health and social care consultancy business to continue sharing his knowledge.
Jim was born in Bromley, Kent, to Madge (nee Hall), a teacher, and Glyn Thomas, a police officer – according to family legend, the teenage David Jones (later Bowie), who lived on the same street, was my father’s babysitter. Jim went to Darrick Wood school in Orpington, then trained to be a nurse at the Ida Darwin hospital in Cambridge. He married Alison Catchpole, a fellow nursing student there, in 1986. Later, in 1997, he gained a master’s in community and primary care from the University of Westminster.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, Jim started documenting his music obsession by posting a CD of the day on social media – and he kept this hobby going until his final weeks. In recent years, he also wrote blogs tackling subjects from love to racism. His final blog was about happiness.
He is survived by Alison, his two sons, Joe and me, and his grandchildren, Axel and Danah.
