Professor Dame Elizabeth Fradd, who has died on her 75th birthday, was a leading children’s nurse who became an NHS “troubleshooter” following the conviction of Beverley Allitt, the nurse given 13 life sentences in 1993 for murdering four infants, attempting to murder three others and causing grievous bodily harm to a further six at Grantham and Kesteven Hospital in Lincolnshire.
Elizabeth Fradd was asked to take over management of the small unit in Grantham where Beverley Allitt had worked to try to restore public confidence in the staff. She provided the help and reorganisation needed to restore morale and made arrangements to provide support.
This led her to work more widely in a troubleshooting role in the health service and she remained in great demand wherever problems arose.
In 2000, when the Commission for Health Improvement (later the Care Quality Commission) was formed, she was appointed its nurse director and lead director for its inspection and review programme. During her four years in the role she oversaw some 7,000 clinical governance reviews and was heavily involved in developing the systems used for the commission’s work.
She was born Elizabeth Harriet Birtwhistle on May 12 1949 in Worcester Park, Surrey, the third of four children. Her father, Norman, was a senior Methodist minister while her mother Harriet, née Abey, was a former teacher. She was educated at Farringtons, a Methodist girls’ boarding school where her father was the school chaplain.
She did not enjoy school, was not encouraged academically, and felt she was being groomed to be a Methodist minister’s wife. None the less she scraped sufficient O-levels to apply for training as a nurse and was admitted to the nursing school at Westminster Hospital. After four years, she qualified in adult and children’s nursing, winning the top prize in her year of 88 students.
A chance encounter with Glenda Jackson at a London art gallery led to her working for a year in Spain, where the actress was filming, as a nanny to her son. She and Glenda Jackson remained lifelong friends.
Back in London, at Westminster Children’s Hospital, Elizabeth Fradd soon became a sister working on the ward where children with immune deficiency were being treated with bone-marrow transplants and nursed in sterile bubbles.
One of her patients was Anthony Nolan, a boy born with a rare blood disorder who died in 1979 before a bone-marrow donor could be found. She went on to help his parents set up the Anthony Nolan Trust, a charity which runs an international registry of bone-marrow donors.
Elizabeth Fradd rose rapidly up the nursing hierarchy and was recruited by Professor Sir David Hull to be nurse in charge of his children’s department at the Queen’s Medical Centre in Nottingham. A Florence Nightingale Scholarship to Australia and New Zealand gave her an opportunity to broaden her skills, and on her return to Nottingham she set up a model community children’s nursing service which took the pressure off hospitals and allowed sick children to be cared for at home, a concept then taken up more widely.
But the event that really changed her life was the Beverley Allitt case, and after working in Grantham, she obtained an MSc in Health Care Policy and Organisation from the University of Nottingham in 1994, aged 45. A year later she became the Director of Nursing and Education at the NHS Executive West Midlands Regional Office. In 1999 she was appointed Assistant Chief Nurse at the Department of Health.
After retiring from the Commission for Health Improvement, in 2004 she worked as a freelance adviser on health services and continued to take an interest in children’s health as a trustee for Contact a Family, as an adviser to Action for Sick Children and as vice-president of Together for Short Lives, the national charity for children and young people with life-limiting diseases.
She chaired the Health Visitor Taskforce launched by the Government in 2011 and served as a member of the Prime Minister’s Commission on the Future of Nursing and Midwifery in 2009-10.
In 2015 she was appointed a Deputy and later Vice Lord-Lieutenant of Nottinghamshire, and in 2020-21 served as High Sheriff of Nottingham. She was a council member of Southwell Cathedral and had a special professorship at the University of Nottingham. She was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in 2004 and appointed DBE for services to nursing in 2009.
Elizabeth Fradd remained active until the end of her life, skiing well into her 70s. When asked why she did not simply retire and tend her wonderful garden, she would reply: “You never know what interest and excitement the next opportunity might bring.”
She loved her village of Tollerton in Nottinghamshire, where she successfully campaigned for road safety measures to protect children.
In 1976 she married Dr Simon Fradd in 1976 but the marriage ended in divorce in 1998. There were no children.
Dame Elizabeth Fradd, born May 12 1949, died May 12 2024
