When June Clark was elected to the governing council of theRoyal College of Nursing(RCN) in 1969, becoming its youngest ever member at 28, it was still a genteel body. Many of her fellows wore hats and gloves to meetings. Clark was soon quietly taken aside and asked to stop breastfeeding her baby in the council chamber.
Although she reluctantly complied on that occasion, Clark, who has died aged 83, would go on to make a career of prodding the nursing establishment to modernise, and especially to shake off its traditional deference to doctors. She was a key figure in the campaign to make all UK nurse training degree-based, which was finally agreed in 2009, and was an early exponent of digital care records, which are slowly coming to pass.
Serving for 24 years on the RCN council, with only one short break, she was the college’s president from 1990 to 1994. Never shy of challenging authority, she addressed her 1991 presidential speech directly to the then Conservative health secretary, William Waldegrave, who had introduced a quasi-market NHS system just weeks previously, telling him to his face: “The reality is that the rough discipline of the market is producing unforeseen consequences which are already causing suffering to patients, chaos in the service and great anxiety.”
Clark’s forthrightness made her a key player in the world of health management, as well as a government adviser and a global authority on nurse education and practice.
With her grounding in classics, she was a passionate and persuasive orator. Admirably punctilious, she would habitually take to the podium in debates at RCN congress by saying that she was going to make “just three points” – and would do just that.
Compromise did not come naturally, however, and supporters and friends would sometimes part company with her over the practicality of her policy ambitions or her impatience for faster change. She could also appear dismissive of some policy areas, such as learning disability nursing, which interested her less.
Born in Sheffield to Marion (nee Walters), a homemaker, and Ernest Hickery, a steel industry trade union official, she was christened Margaret but was always known by her middle name, June. Her parents came from south Wales but her father had been temporarily relocated to Sheffield during the second world war. The family soon returned to Risca, near Newport, a community reliant on steel and coal.
June excelled at Pontywaun grammar school, and became committed to pursuing a nursing career once she had begun volunteering as a teenager with St John Ambulance and then, every Saturday, at St Woolos hospital in nearby Newport.
She would have preferred to have gone straight from school into nurse training, but after much argument with her parents they eventually corralled her into accepting a place at University College London (UCL), from which she emerged in 1962 with a degree in classics and a steady boyfriend, Roger Clark, also a classics scholar.
Once she had finished at UCL, her long-awaited nurse training began at University College hospital in London. There, in 1963, she became the first delegate of the then Student Nurses’ Association (later absorbed by the RCN) to the annual National Union of Students’ conference, moving a resolution condemning “the archaic principles governing the lives of student nurses”. It was passed unanimously.
She qualified in 1965 and married Roger the following year, moving to Berkshire, where he had begun a career in administration at Reading University. Rather than settling for a hospital job on qualification, she undertook further training to become a health visitor, beginning her work in that role in 1967 in Mortimer, near Reading, where she set up a family planning clinic and a health education programme in local schools.
From then onwards, Clark was a fierce proponent of the value of health visiting, which, unlike many others, she considered to be an integral part of nursing. She particularly lamented the narrowing of the health visitor’s remit from the 1970s onwards, and later, in 1985, as part of a doctorate at South Bank Polytechnic, she wrote an influential thesis on health visiting that set out a theoretical framework she believed it lacked. She also established an annual research workshop for health visitors.
Similarly, Clark believed that personal care delivered by social care workers was also nursing, and called it a “travesty” that such work was assessed and commissioned by social workers, not nurses. She was a member of the 1997 royal commission on long-term care that called for free personal care in the UK – a recommendation accepted only in Scotland.
After her start as a health visitor, Clark had a varied career in the health service. She filled clinical nursing posts during the 70s before combining teaching and research with bringing up a family, and then resuming her work as a health visitor in Berkshire in 1981. From the mid-80s she held senior health authority positions in London, including as a special projects coordinator at Lewisham and North Southwark, director of community nursing services at West Lambeth and chief nursing adviser at Harrow – all the while writing regularly in the nursing press and even serving as agony aunt in Mother & Baby magazine.
In 1990 she moved into academia as professor of nursing and head of the new school of health studies at Middlesex Polytechnic (now Middlesex University). She later described this as her toughest job and, burned out, she took early retirement after five years. But she set Middlesex on course to be a leading centre of health education.
After leaving Middlesex, Clark spent large parts of the next two years studying and advising in Europe and the US. Much of what she saw reaffirmed her faith in the NHS: she would often recall arriving at a nursing conference in Los Angeles to be asked by her hotel porter if she might look at a lump in his mouth as he could not afford to go to a doctor.
Clark was made a dame in 1995 for her services to nursing and health visiting, and in 1997 was tempted back to academia and to Wales, becoming professor of community nursing at Swansea University. Thereafter she focused increasingly on Welsh health affairs, including leading reviews for the Welsh government and campaigning successfully for legislation on safe staffing levels.
She grew disenchanted with the direction of the RCN, believing it was giving too much emphasis to its trade union function at the expense of its role as a professional body. However, she remained an active member and sat on the college’s Wales board as recently as 2022. In retirement she also led the RCN’s involvement in the National Pensioners Convention.
Clark stepped down from her Swansea post in 2003, on the same day that Roger retired from Reading University. They had by then gradually relocated from Berkshire to Mumbles, near Swansea, where she died while picking flowers in their garden.
She is survived by Roger, their children, Andrew and Gill, five grandchildren and her sister, Kay.
Margaret June Clark, nursing leader, born 31 May 1941; died 14 May 2025