Jean Robinson

Jean Robinson (17 April 1930 – 4 June 2025) was a British activist for patient rights.

Robinson was the author of the 1988 pamphlet A Patient Voice at the GMC: A Lay Member's View of the General Medical Council. She was the chair of the Patients Association and she served as a lay member of the General Medical Council (GMC) in the 1980s. Robinson became a visiting professor at the University of Ulster in 1997.

At the age of 23, she joined a course in politics, history and economics at Ruskin College where she discovered the "overwhelming riches" of the Bodlian Library. She got a chance to study US politics in New York when she was sent on an exchange to Sarah Lawrence College during the Ruskin course.

Robinson and sociologist John L. Anderson hosted an April 1978 episode of the BBC One programme Wordpower about the difficulties of communication with medical professionals.

Robinson was the chair of the Patients Association from 1973 to 1975. In 2002, Robinson wrote an article for the British Journal of Midwifery that expressed concern that midwives were not experiencing enough breech births, writing that "Women are losing the opportunity to have vaginal births and those that are being carried out are being carried out by obstetricians. Women are supposed to have a choice. At present, only those who can afford a private midwife are likely to get a midwifery breech delivery" and that midwives "...would not have the skills or the confidence to deliver them vaginally. More and more breeches now mean a routine Caesarean".

Robinson collaborated with Beverley Lawrence Beech, the Honorary Chair of AIMS, on the second edition of Ultrasound – Unsound? A critique of ultrasound uses in maternity care.