In 1977 Liz (Elizabeth) Shore, who has died aged 94, became deputy chief medical officer (DCMO). She held this post, one of the highest positions in medicine, for eight years. In 1984, Shore would have been appointed to the top job – chief medical officer – as she was the strongest candidate, but the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, vetoed the appointment, suspicious of Shore’s Labour connections. (Her husband, Peter, was in the shadow cabinet.)
In the 1970s the medical career structure was pyramid-shaped, with junior doctors working more than 70 hours a week and competing for a tiny number of consultant posts. This career path in particular did not suit women with children, who were leaving in droves; one study found that 40% of female medical graduates were leaving the profession.
Shore herself had struggled to find suitable work as a GP while bringing up her four children and knew only too well how opportunities could be few and far between. So she seized her chance as DCMO to make the medical career structure more female-friendly.
To practise as a doctor there are costs such as insurance and journal subscriptions. Shore persuaded regional health authorities that if a doctor worked just one session a week (half a day), the authority should pick up the bill for these costs. This made it much more worthwhile for women to stay working part-time. Shore was also part of discussions between the then Department of Health and Social Security and various doctors’ committees that resulted in a white paper recommending changing the ratio of senior to junior doctors and creating 100 additional consultant posts over two years. This, and other changes to doctors’ grades and working hours, was the start of a sea change making the career structure more flexible, with increased opportunities to become a consultant.
The role of the chief medical officers is to advise health ministers and they are a crucial source of continuity, particularly when there is a fast ministerial turnover. Shore started as a DCMO at a particularly difficult time, in the aftermath of the Labour health minister Barbara Castle’s attempt to end private beds in NHS hospitals, the British Medical Association having retaliated with industrial action.
Shore was adept at negotiation and bringing people together. She had a funny, self-deprecating manner that was disarming but she was also pragmatic and could be forceful if required. In her Who’s Who entry, she listed her hobby as “swimming in rough seas”, which those who knew her thought might have referred as much to Whitehall as to the Cornish Atlantic.
As DCMO, Shore’s portfolio included health inequalities. In 1978 she led the UK delegation at the World Health Organization conference in Alma-Ata, USSR (now Almaty, Kazakhstan). One of the milestones in 20th-century public health, this conference got 134 countries to agree to key principles and commit to funding and strengthening primary healthcare.
Shore served on the inquiry, chaired by Douglas Black, into health inequality in the UK, which recommended measures such as improving housing and increasing child benefit. She urged the slow-moving committee to produce an interim report and key findings in time for the May 1979 election, and was disappointed when the incoming Conservative health minister Patrick Jenkin decided to bury the report by publishing it on the August bank holiday and rejected its findings.
By 1985 Shore was disenchanted with serving successive Conservative ministers. (If Thatcher visited the department’s offices, Shore was known to hide in the ladies’ lavatory.) She left the civil service, becoming dean of postgraduate medicine at the North West Thames Regional Health Authority. There and as president of the Medical Women’s Federation in 1990-92 she continued to champion women’s progression in medicine. In 1980 she was made a Companion of the Order of the Bath for services to medicine.
Liz was born in Oxford, the youngest of seven children. Her Canadian father, Edward Wrong, was a history don and vice-principal of Magdalen College, Oxford, and her mother, Rosalind (nee Smith), was also a historian. Six months after Liz was born, Edward died and Rosalind had to make drastic changes. The youngest three children were shipped off to stay with their grandfather in Toronto, whose household Elizabeth found austere and cheerless.
When Liz was 10, her mother was back on her feet and managed to get the children home to live with her in Oxford. Liz attended Oxford high school and Cheltenham ladies’ college before winning a scholarship to read natural sciences at Newnham College, Cambridge. There she met Peter Shore, a fellow student, at a May Day party and they married in 1948.
Liz trained in medicine at St Bartholomew’s hospital in London, one of only five women in a class of 60. She spent her 20s and 30s bringing up her children and working as a GP in and around London and in Harlow, Essex. She said she had no idea that the civil service employed doctors, but, restless with her role in family planning and community health, aged 35 she answered an advertisement to join the Ministry of Health and never looked back.
Peter became MP for Stepney in east London in 1964. He was part of the Labour leader Harold Wilson’s “kitchen cabinet” of close friends and colleagues, and later became a peer as Lord Shore of Stepney. Liz supported him throughout his career but, at the same time, as a high-ranking civil servant, tried to be discreet about her political views. Their home in Putney, west London, was a busy hub, with both political colleagues and extended family often coming over for dinner, and Liz liked to switch off from work and immerse herself in domesticity, baking cakes and hosting dinner parties.
After Peter’s death in 2001, Liz, who by now was retired, decided to decamp to St Ives in Cornwall, where for many years they had surfed and enjoyed holidays. She took an Open University degree and, well into her 80s, swam in the sea every day and joined the coastguard watch. She had spent the past couple of years in a care home.
Her son Piers died in 1977. She is survived by her daughters, Thomasina and Tacy, and son Crispin, nine grandchildren and 12 great-grandchildren.
• Liz (Elizabeth) Catherine Shore, doctor and civil servant, born 19 August 1927; died 20 February 2022
