Remembering Pete Gillard

With great sadness, Keep Our NHS Public bids goodbye to Pete Gillard, who died on 21 April. Pete was a tireless health campaigner, a lifelong socialist and trade unionist, an Executive Committee member in Keep Our NHS Public and Treasurer for our sister organisation, Health Campaigns Together.

Pete was a founding member, alongside his partner Gill George, of Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin Defend Our NHS, which launched in March 2014 and quickly became a major force to be reckoned with at local level and a trailblazing outfit in national NHS campaigning. For the last 7 years, Pete’s relentless energy and work ethic and his keen eye for detail were at the heart of the group’s diligent and successful campaigns to defend local services against closures and centralisation. The hospital in which Pete died, Ludlow Community Hospital, is still open today in great part due to the brilliant campaign the group mounted against its closure in 2017.

Pete will be remembered, above all, for having done so much to train and cultivate new generations of activists, in the world of health campaigning and beyond.

Pete’s full obituary can be found on the “In Memory” section of our website.