When June Clark was elected to the governing council of the Royal 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.
