Australian Dictionary of Biography

Jan Baldwin

Courtesy of Bob Walsh

Jan Robyn Baldwin (1950–1999), nurse and diabetes educator, was born on 31 August 1950 in Sydney, elder daughter of New South Wales-born Marjorie Winifred Stewart, née Spicer, barmaid, and Jack Stewart. In 1951 Marjorie married Kenneth Edmund Geaghan, cellarman. Jan was a ‘sickly child’ (Adams, pers. comm.) and at the age of four, as a result of being hospitalised after she was electrocuted from touching a bathroom tap during a lightening strike, she was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. She received her early education at Catholic schools at Enmore and Campbelltown before the family moved to Tathra on the New South Wales south coast. In 1962, having divorced Geaghan, her mother remarried Alexander Baldwin, dairy farmer, whose surname Jan later took by deed poll. She attended Bega High School (c. 1962–64) until their return to Sydney, where she gained her Intermediate certificate at Willoughby Girls’ High School in 1966. Her mother died that year from uterine cancer.

Baldwin left school at sixteen and worked as a clerical assistant. Then, in 1970, she began training as a nurse at the Concord Repatriation General Hospital (CRGH) in Sydney. Over the following years, she undertook training at the Royal Alexandra Hospital for Children, Concord, and the Gladesville Mental Hospital. She also spent time as a nurse at the Princess Alexandra Hospital in Brisbane. By late 1976 she had returned to work at CRGH. In 1979 she obtained a diploma in nursing education at the Cumberland College of Health Sciences and began teaching student nurses.

It was around this time that Baldwin was appointed as CRGH’s diabetes nurse educator. There were rising concerns about the standards and regulation of training for diabetes education. Some educators received no formal training, and there was a need for more multidisciplinary approaches. In 1981, on the suggestion of the endocrinologist John Carter, she organised for a group of Australian doctors, nurses, and dietitians to form a professional organisation dedicated to ‘diabetes education, management and care’ (Martin 1998, 65). The inaugural general meeting, held at the Royal North Shore Hospital on 14 November 1981, was the genesis of the Australian Diabetes Educators Association (ADEA), which became the peak national body for accreditation of diabetes practitioners. She was made an inaugural life member (1982) and later served as national (1994–96) and State branch (c. 1994) president.

In early 1987 Baldwin was working for a medical supplies company, Boehringer Mannheim, when she met Robert John Walsh, car detailer. They were married on 11 September 1988 at Durham Park, Castle Hill, with Presbyterian rites.

While she was working at Lidcombe Hospital she helped establish the first national standards of practice for diabetes education in 1991, and was later involved with the Diabetes Centre at Westmead Hospital in the mid-1990s. Further, she was a member of an expert working group coordinated by ADEA and the New South Wales Health Department to devise official guidelines for diabetes education for health professionals. In 1997 she was one of the recipients of the inaugural Diabetes Australia awards.

Many of those who benefited from Baldwin’s care were children. For many years she volunteered at camps for children with diabetes, where she was fondly known as ‘camp mum.’ In 1993 she was appointed to the board of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. Her personal experience of growing up with the condition informed her advocacy. Rhonda Griffiths, a friend and colleague, remembered her as a ‘small’ but ‘brave person’ who bore her struggle with diabetes with quiet dignity and determination. As a young nurse, years before finger-prick blood glucose tests were available, Baldwin would begin her day by ‘rising at 4:30am to boil her urine to check her blood sugar level and to have her insulin before going on duty’ (Griffiths 1999, 40). She was also passionate about motorsport and a doting dog owner.

By the mid-1990s Baldwin’s health had deteriorated to the extent that she required renal dialysis. In 1997 her sister Diane donated a kidney but, within days of the transplant, it failed and had to be removed. Despite her worsening health, Baldwin continued to work for the New South Wales Nurses’ Association and studied at the University of Technology Sydney (MEd, 1999). She died on 1 June 1999 of coronary heart disease and renal failure and was cremated. The ADEA subsequently established an annual award and oration in her name.