Professor Dame June Clark
DBE, PhD, RN, RHV, FRCN
June Clark qualified as a nurse at University College Hospital, London after obtaining an honours degree in Classics at London University. She then qualified as a health visitor, and remained in community nursing as a practitioner, manager, researcher, teacher, and political advocate for nearly 40 years.
While bringing up her two children, she worked part time as a nurse while continuing her academic work – she obtained her MPhil degree at the University of Reading in 1972, and her doctorate from the South Bank University in 1985. During this time she was also a member of a health authority, and she lectured and published extensively on community nursing.
She worked in the NHS for 25 years, as a health visitor in Berkshire, Special Projects Co-ordinator in Guys and Lewisham Health Authority, Director of Community Nursing Services for West Lambeth, and finally as Chief Nurse to Harrow Health Authority. In 1990 she left the NHS and moved to higher education where, as Professor of Nursing, she established the School of Health Care Studies at Middlesex University. In 1997 she went home to Wales as Professor of Community Nursing at the University of Wales Swansea, where, following her retirement in 2003, she remains Professor Emeritus.
Her earlier research was concerned with the development of health visiting. More recently, her work has focused on the development of standardised languages and computerised information systems to describe nursing practice – a continuation of what she describes as her life-long mission to understand and to communicate to others the richness and complexity of "this thing called nursing". Her most recent work in this field has been the leadership of the Royal College of Nursing’s Defining Nursing project.
She has also been heavily involved at an international level. Following the break-up of the Soviet Union she worked to help develop nursing leadership in Kazahkstan and Romania. She is a visiting professor at the University of Iowa, USA, and the University of Maribor, Slovenia. She is a frequent speaker at international conferences, has participated in numerous international task groups and workshops, has acted as consultant to WHO and ICN, and has represented the UK at ICN and European Union committees.
She has been an RCN activist since her student days and has held many leadership roles in the RCN, including serving as President 1990–1994. She was awarded the RCN Award of Merit in 1996. In 1995 she was invested as Dame Commander of the British Empire for services to nursing.
Her current interests and expertise are primarily in health policy (she is a NED of Carmarthenshire NHS Trust), services for older people (she was a member of the Royal Commission on Long-Term Care and a member of the Welsh NSF for Older People implementation group), and health informatics (she currently chairs the RCN IN Forum).
Publications
June is on the editorial boards of Nursing Inquiry, Journal of Nursing Scholarship, and American Journal of Nursing. She has written numerous papers for refereed nursing journals, as well as five books and several chapters in edited books.