Thu 30 Jul 2020 06.12 EDT
Last modified on Thu 30 Jul 2020 06.17 EDT
My sister Jan Heath, who has died of pancreatic cancer aged 76, was a medical social worker by training. Both her career and the causes she supported enabled her to pursue her passion for fairness and social justice.
Born and brought up in Cobham, Surrey, the daughter of Oliver Thompson, a Shell Oil executive, and his wife, Phyllida (nee Bryant), a housewife and active community organiser, Jan was educated at Sherborne girls school in Dorset and Trinity College Dublin, where she read sociology. She then trained as a medical social worker, working in London at Evelina Children’s hospital and at King’s College hospital.
While travelling in Canada in 1970 she met Ian Heath, an aeronautical engineer, in Montreal – a meeting that ignited a lifelong enthusiasm for the mountains and wilderness of Canada. They married the following year and eventually settled in Calgary, where Jan pursued her career in medical social work, working at Alberta Children’s hospital, while achieving an MA at the University of Calgary, in 1994.
Holidays were spent exploring the Canadian wilderness, including epic trips down the Churchill and Nahanni rivers. The arrival of their children, Emily and Rory, did little to curb their adventures.
Jan was a committed Anglican and alongside her professional work she had a strong sense of social justice, often working through her church with projects such as volunteering with Habitat for Humanity in building houses in El Salvador and more recently helping with the resettlement of refugees from Syria – whom she introduced to cross-country skiing.
Following her separation from Ian (they later divorced in 2007), Jan joined the Calgary Scope Society – a leading disability charity – as a therapist, in due course becoming the clinical lead. Though retired from full-time practice, she was still supporting and mentoring the clinical team there a month before her death.
In retirement Jan poured her energies into a number of causes, serving on the boards of organisations including Ten Thousand Villages, a fair trade retail store, and the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund, the Anglican Church of Canada’s agency for sustainable development and relief. She was vice president of Ujamaa Grandmas, an initiative of the Stephen Lewis Foundation that raises money to support grandmothers in Africa who have become “in loco parentis” through the spread of Aids and HIV. Wherever Jan saw unfairness, inequality or a social need she felt compelled to act and to carry others with her.
She felt a strong pull towards her country of birth and would visit the UK at least annually, going most often to Aldeburgh in Suffolk, where our parents had retired, and where our great-aunt Edith had left her house, the Gables, to my sisters and me.
Jan is survived by Emily and Rory, her granddaughter Ida, and her siblings Alison, Francie and me.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2020/jul/30/jan-heath-obituary
