John Shine, who has died of pneumonia aged 67, was co-founder of the HIV/Aids centre London Lighthouse and a pioneer in the provision of care for people diagnosed with HIV and Aids.
As a gay man who grew up in the 1950s, John overcame numerous obstacles in life. His childhood was spent in Clerkenwell, London, and then Aveley, Essex, where at the age of 10 he got a job making tea at a local hairdressing salon. When he left school at 15, he returned to London to stay with his grandmother and trained to be a hairdresser. In 1973 he started nurse training at the former St Stephen's hospital (now Chelsea and Westminster) and in the early 80s was closely involved in identifying the first patients with HIV/Aids in the UK.
Realising that no specialist care existed for these patients, he campaigned to establish the first Aids-related clinic at St Stephen's and then, having trained as a counsellor, went on to set up an HIV/Aids counselling service alongside it.
Seeing how hospices were turning people with Aids away, John soon joined forces with a bereavement counsellor, Christopher Spence, and Andrew Henderson, director of social services at the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea. Like John, both men were alarmed that people dying of Aids were being denied terminal care, and consequently the idea to build a holistic centre targeted specifically at people facing HIV and Aids was born.
In 1988, against a backdrop of fear and hostility, and with dire predictions of the numbers affected, London Lighthouse opened its doors. Situated in Ladbroke Grove, west London, it was a pioneering integrated model of care with services including crisis intervention, one-to-one counselling and a residential unit providing respite and terminal care. In the early years, 2,000 people a week walked through its doors seeking help and advice.
Any organisation whose aim is to forge a radical form of care is bound to disappoint some advocates along the way and John soon became disillusioned, leaving London Lighthouse in 1989 to set up his own organisation, the Red Admiral Project, which concentrated solely on providing counselling to individuals, their partners and families. It grew into an organisation managing 3,000 sessions a year for 700 clients, with a staff of about a dozen.
In 1994 John went into private practice as a counsellor, with a broad and distinctive experience base to offer his clients. I met him in the early 1990s while writing a book about meeting the challenge of HIV and Aids at London Lighthouse. He never retired, but his own battle with myeloid leukaemia over several years left him increasingly tired, with little energy for activities outside his work.
He is survived by his two sisters, Margaret and Irene.