My wife, Marianne Rigge, who has died aged 77, was a passionate public advocate for the interests of NHS patients, and a pioneer in creating ways of giving people easier access to medical and health information.
The daughter of a GP, she founded a national charity, the College of Health, with the renowned social entrepreneur Michael Young, in response to their experiences as patients and in the consumer movement. Young was the inspiration behind organisations including the Open University and the Consumers’ Association, which he launched in 1957.
Marianne joined the Consumers’ Association in the 1970s, and she and Young set up the College of Health in 1983, with the aim of influencing NHS doctors to put the needs of patients at the centre of treatment and care decisions. She ran the charity as director, from Bethnal Green, east London, for 20 years and it helped thousands of people. It operated a telephone service with recorded medical information about a range of diseases and conditions, which was considered technologically innovative for its time.
Long before hospital treatment waiting times became a way of judging how well the NHS is performing, the College of Health published waiting lists – as a service for patients. At the time, GPs could refer patients to any consultant around the country, if they were prepared to travel to get treatment sooner. Marianne unearthed the lists from the House of Commons library, to publish the annual Guide to Hospital Waiting Lists, which first appeared in 1984.
She gave talks to doctors and to medical institutions, telling them of the actual experiences and views of patients – backed by case studies – whom they often saw only briefly on ward rounds.
As a young woman, with a French degree but no medical qualifications, Marianne was at first daunted by the ranks of seasoned, sometimes hostile, practitioners. But she had a gift for writing and speaking, and influenced many with her eloquence.
She wrote articles for several publications, including as a columnist for the Health Service Journal. Television news producers frequently called her when they wanted a patient’s view. She was appointed OBE in 2000.
Marianne was the daughter of an Irish doctor, Noel O’Mahony, and his wife, Nora (nee Daly) and was born in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, where her father was working. The family then moved to east London and Marianne first came across patients when driving her father on his rounds in Forest Gate. She had already spent time in hospital as a child, when, at the age of seven, she suffered severe burns when her nightdress caught fire.
Educated at St Angela’s Ursuline Convent school in Forest Gate, she then did a year at Marlborough Gate secretarial college, by Hyde Park, before studying at University College London from 1967 to 1970.
After graduating, she worked for the Consumers’ Association as project assistant for Which? magazine and part-time personal assistant to the chair, Jennifer Jenkins, wife of the then home secretary, Roy Jenkins. In 1976 she became Young’s research assistant when he was chair of the National Consumer Council.
She married Simon Rigge in 1968 and had two daughters, Katie and Emma, and a son, Thomas, who died of cot death; they separated in 1982 and divorced in 1989. She and I married in 1990.
Marianne is survived by me, Katie and Emma, her sister, Jane, and brothers, James and Fergus.
