My wife, Loretto Lambe, who has died aged 72, was founder and CEO of the profound disability charity Promoting a More Inclusive Society (Pamis).
It was on going to work for Mencap in 1975, after running Savoury and Moore’s pharmacy on Bond Street, that she developed an unremitting passion for supporting individuals with profound and multiple learning disabilities and their families. Personal assistant to successive CEOs of Mencap, including Sir Brian Rix (now Lord Rix), in 1985 she became director of Mencap’s Profound Disability Project in Manchester, which she ran for the next six years.
I met Loretto on a Mencap study tour to the USSR in 1977, and there began what she referred to as a “trial period” of our relationship; this lasted for 13 years before she finally agreed to marriage in 1990. That year we moved together to the University of Dundee, where she set up Pamis, unpaid and unaided for two years, becoming its CEO from 1992 until her retirement last year. In those 22 years she built Pamis into an extensive and well-funded organisation supporting many families, and in due course Pamis became a formal unit within the university.
For Loretto, the starting point for all Pamis initiatives was what parent carers told her they needed. Enabling improved access to and participation in the community was therefore a priority, and an area in which she brought about many improvements. The problems they encountered with their daughters and sons in using conventional toilets for disabled people led her to initiate the national Changing Places campaign, which resulted in the creation of more than 600 fully accessible toilet facilities across the UK.
As a charity worker, Loretto was particularly gratified to be invited to co-chair the principal international research group in the field of profound disability, and also to join the intellectual disability committee of the Royal Society of Medicine.
Loretto was born in Sligo in north-west Ireland, one of six children of Bertie, a train driver, and Florence (nee Crawford), a restaurateur. She attended the Convent of Mercy school in the town, and on leaving school she worked for 10 years in pharmacies locally and in Dublin and London. It was the quest for a career change that took her to Mencap.
In recent years, although extremely ill and aware she was dying, Loretto continued to develop her work on profound disability, as well as pursuing her passions for gardening and literature. There was much more she wanted to do, but she did have time to set up the Loretto Lambe Learning Disability Consultancy earlier this year.
I survive her, as do her four sisters, Maura, Florence, Paul and Emily, 21 nieces and nephews, and two step-daughters.
