Dr Robin Irvine

Progressive geriatrician

Robin Eliot Irvine, geriatric physician: born Godalming, Surrey 27 September 1920; consultant, Hastings Health Authority 1958-85; President, British Geriatric Society 1981-84; CBE 1983; married 1947 Peggy Walter (died 1996; three sons, four daughters); died St Peter Port, Guernsey 25 December 2002.

Robin Irvine was one of the leaders of the revolution in the medical care of old people. When he arrived in Hastings as a consultant to the local health authority in 1958, he found 300 patients in custodial care in four hospitals, one a former workhouse. He transformed the regime into an acute specialty. Within a year of his appointment as consultant, he started the first formal collaboration between a geriatrician and an orthopaedic surgeon, with Michael Devas, so that patients who had a hip operation, for instance, received joint management of their condition.

When he produced a seminal textbook, The Older Patient, in 1968 he did so with a nurse and a social worker, and an occupational therapist as illustrator. Through several editions it remained in print for 25 years.

The son of a schoolmaster, Irvine went to Winchester College and King's College, Cambridge. Completing his medical studies at Guy's Hospital he was awarded the Golding Bird Medal. As a consultant Irvine applied Wykehamist principles. Nurses, even student nurses, found themselves not just tolerated but welcomed on ward rounds and at case conferences, and patients were treated as people when he sat on the bed talking to them. He believed in interdisciplinary collaboration as a means of achieving high standards of care and rehabilitation. He was a great encourager. Tall and broad-shouldered, he laughed a lot.

His professional input nationally with the British Geriatric Society included membership of joint working parties with the Royal College of Nursing and the Royal College of Psychiatrists on improving the care of elderly people in hospital.

On retirement Irvine moved to St Peter Port, Guernsey, but continued to visit the mainland as a member of the NHS Health Advisory Service. whose interdisciplinary teams reviewed services for mentally ill people and for elderly people.

The Department of Medicine for the Elderly which Irvine set up at Hastings now admits 4,000 patients a year and has three consultants. At Bexhill Hospital, the geriatric section and day hospital is named the Irvine Unit.

"Bobby" Irvine was a devoted Roman Catholic. He married a nurse, Peggy Walter, in 1947 and she started meals on wheels for old people in Hastings – theirs was very much a working partnership.

Laurence Dopson