Described as “a best -type disorders, health activist Jean Robinson, who died at the age of 95, defended the rights of patients, pregnant women and disadvantaged people for over 50 years. She was president of the patient association, president of AIMS (Association for Improvements in Maunity Services) and profane member and frank critic of the doctors’ regulatory organization The General Medical Council. In 1988, she wrote to the explosive booklet an patient in GMC, throwing her shortcomings and contributing to her reform.
The career of Robinson activists took off in 1966, when, living in Oxford and taking care of her young son, she was invited to become a secular member of the Regional Health Council. She was not ready to be a rubber stamp meeting and said that the board of directors had almost fell from her chair when “The Token Housewife” came to her office with detailed questions on perinatal mortality rates.
Robinson has always worked on a voluntary basis and had no training in clinical care or social care. But that gave him independence to examine health care decisions and defend patients. She said: “I am always concerned about people who think they can make decisions concerning the lives of others. In politics, we have had a certain degree of democracy, while in education, medicine and health care, we had no power from the bottom.”
She was passionately eager to provide the functioning of the Regional Health Council. Armed with a medical dictionary and a library card, she read in a voracious manner, even examining the management circular of the driest hospital. The condescending administration strengthened it and the more it discovered how health care was managed in its patch, the more it felt forced to express itself, calling, for example, the way children living with Down syndrome were closed in an old -fashioned asylum.
She was not afraid to upset colleagues. In fact, in 1973, Richard Crossman, the Secretary of State for Work for Health, asked to meet her, saying: “I have never seen in all my public life to get rid of anyone. They hate you absolutely.” They had a good exchange and Crossman did not license Robinson, but as she had been in the health council for seven years, she decided to leave and take up a new challenge.
She then joined the association of patients, which had been created following the Thalidomide scandal. The founder wanted to retire, so Robinson became his chair. She has spent the next three years responding to hundreds of complaints every week of the public. Many came from new mothers. Robinson said: “The letters on birth jumped from the page.” In the 1970s, 60% of women received a drop of oxytocin to induce work, which caused serious and sudden contractions. This could be very traumatic, inducing a shape of shell shock. Robinson decided to study research underlies this practice. She found that a main study, carried out in Glasgow, was on a far too small sample. The researchers wanted to see if the induction of births could reduce the rate of mortinity and gave oxytocin to 100 women, by comparing them to others receiving standard care.
However, the rate of mortinity at that time in Glasgow was three out of 1,000, so such a small study could not prove anything. Robinson wrote to Lancet Medical Journal stressing it, as well as many other faults. To skeptical detractors who thought that his letter had been written by an obstetrician, Robinson replied: “No doctor wrote it for me.
When young widows had a higher risk of cervical cancer, it was presumed that it was because they quickly took new sexual partners. But Robinson asked the question “Who is widowed early?” They were often wives of men in professions such as construction, mining or asbestos, and as she pointed out, the exhibition of women to carcinogenic chemicals could have played a role.
In 1975, when her mandate as president of the association ended, Robinson joined the honorary research objectives. It was a role which, according to her, adapted it to a glove, combining calls on the line of assistance with writing summaries of the latest obstetric research in simple English for her quarterly newspaper. Listen to new mothers to the phone every day opened his eyes on mental health problems.
She persuaded the Ministry of Health to recognize suicide as a key cause of maternal death and the letter she wrote with Beverley Beech in 1987 at the British Journal of Psychiatry on nightmares after childbirth is credited in medical literature as the first identification of the postnatal spts. Robinson also questioned routine episiotomies and defended women threatened to withdraw their babies, exposing the fact that social services had targets to increase adoptions.
In 1979, Robinson was appointed secular member of the General Medical Council, where she heard cases within the professional conduct committee. She was shocked that the public was so badly served. For example, the rules of the GMC only made up for eight weeks to complain about a general practitioner, from the event, and not from the moment when the person was aware of a problem. If a woman with a breast bump was not examined correctly by her general practitioner, for example, this could take him for months to realize that the bump increased, when the deadline would have expired.
In 1988, Robinson wrote a patient’s patient in GMC, described as “a remarkable initiate story”. He detailed all the problems, explaining why three -quarters of submitted complaints were not even heard. Meeting her, the secretary of state conservative to health Kenneth Clarke said that the booklet was rather critical and wink: “I am not opposed to that.” The booklet has fueled an increasing clamor of change. The pressure of politicians, the British Medical Journal and others, as well as events such as Bristol’s heart scandal in the 1990s, finally caused major changes to GMC.
She was born in Southwark, London, the second of the three children of Charles Lynch, clerk in Tate and Lyle, and Ellen (née Penfold). When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Jean and his two brothers were evacuated to Somerset and 18 months later in Cornwall. When she returned to London in 1945, her parents urged her to take a secretarial lesson so that she could get a work in white collar. While she was on the course, she joined the Labory League of Youth, to the great disappointment of her parents conservative of the working class. But, she said: “From the earliest, I was interested in less privileged people and that something should be done on this subject.”
She obtained a job at the Daily Herald, a national labor newspaper, then became secretary of the deputy Geoffrey de Freitas, who encouraged her, 23 years old, to apply for the Ruskin College of Oxford to make a two -year diploma in politics, history and economics. She enjoyed the chance to learn. By entering the Bodleian library for the first time, she said: “I felt overwhelmed with wealth. If you put me in a room full of jewelry, that could not have equaled what I felt.” In the middle of the course, she spent a year as a student in exchange for the Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York, where she studied American politics.
During her stay at Ruskin College, she met the economist of the labor market Derek Robinson, which she married in 1956. The couple adopted Toby in 1965, had a daughter Lucy later and took up residence in Oxford. She obtained a secretarial position in the Nielsen Market Study company, which led to work with the Oxford Consumers group. However, she discovered that the job possibilities in Oxford were rare and volunteer could be the way for a much more interesting work, so in 1966, she agreed to be a secular member of the Regional Health Council.
In addition to her work at the GMC, Robinson remained involved in Aims and was elected president in 2010, not withdrawn until 2018. From 1995 to 2006, she wrote a column for the British Journal of Midwifery, giving midsts an overview of the problems of the perspective of a user, and in 1997, she was made a visiting teacher at the University of Ulster Charcons on medical ethics. She was also an administrator of a female 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.
