My wife, Ros Chown, who has died aged 71, spent most of her working career as a sexual health adviser (SHA) in genito-urinary medicine in Cambridge, Wakefield and Torbay. She was an active member of the Society of Health Advisors in Sexual Transmitted Diseases and contributed to the Department of Health’s Handbook for Sexual Health Advisers (2004).
Ros was a strong advocate of the public health role of SHAs in reducing sexually transmitted infections through advice on safe sex and contraception, partner notification, health promotion and counselling. In the early 1990s she was at the forefront of advising patients about new antiviral measures for the treatment of HIV that were being introduced.
Ros also provided advice and training on sexual health and HIV for other healthcare professionals, GPs, practice nurses and midwives. She was a determined advocate of the non-judgmental, person-centred approach and joined with the Wakefield Working Women’s Project to support sex workers. She also collaborated with local youth services, teenage mothers and support groups for gay men.
Born in Wanstead, Essex, Ros was the daughter of Thomas Kennedy, an economist, and Audrey (nee Plunkett), a teacher. Shortly after her birth the family moved to Uganda, returning to the UK when she was seven. She attended St Hilda’s Church of England school in Sevenoaks, Kent, and began a teacher training course at Durham University before switching to nursing, training at the West Suffolk hospital in Bury St Edmunds and qualifying in 1987.
Thereafter she worked at Addenbrooke’s hospital in Cambridge (1988-90), Clayton hospital in Wakefield (1991-2003) and then Torbay hospital in Devon, until retiring in 2019. While at Torbay she gained a first-class degree in health and social care from the Open University in 2005.
We met in Bury St Edmunds in 1987, when I was a playworker in Cambridge. After Ros got her job at Addenbrooke’s we lived in Milton, Cambridge, and married in 1988. We moved to Wakefield, West Yorkshire, in 1990, so that I could study at Leeds Metropolitan University, and to Devon in 2003 when I become programme manager of the Torbay Children’s Fund.
Ros was a keen knitter and in her later years extended her interest to other forms of needlecraft, particularly quilting and embroidery. She was much loved and admired by her stitching friends for her quirky designs and attention to detail.
She also maintained an interest in politics, and was a long-term member of the Labour party – she had been named Ros after the socialist suffragette Rosalind Travers Hyndman, and her grandfather, Thomas Kennedy, had been a Labour MP during the inter-war years.
Ros is survived by me and her son, Ben, from her first marriage, to Stan Mitson, which ended in divorce, and her siblings, Tom and Diki.
