Professor Yvonne Carter, who has died aged 50 of breast cancer, showed how one general practitioner could impact positively on patients; on medical practice; on academia; on the training of doctors; and on medical research across the UK. After taking academic primary care in east London through a renaissance, she was an obvious choice to lead the new Warwick Medical School to independence in 2006, as only the third female dean of such an institution in Britain.
Her father had died before she was born, in Liverpool, where she went to Notre Dame high school. Soon after qualifying in medicine at St Mary's hospital, London, in 1983, Yvonne returned to Liverpool to support her dying mother. At the city's Alder Hey hospital, she met Michael Bannon, a paediatrician. They married in 1988, and published extensively on safeguarding children.
She credited her GP trainer, Brian McGuinness, in Runcorn, Cheshire, with inspiring her love of "clinical generalism" and the wish to combine general practice with an academic career. She went on to become one of the leading lights of research practice and innovation at the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Her research was broad, with clinical papers on falls in the elderly, homelessness, domestic violence, bereavement, and HIV/Aids in primary care. Similarly, Yvonne collaborated on books on paediatrics, sexual health, palliative care and accident prevention. Interwoven with all this came policy studies on the governance of research on patients in primary care, on academic practice, and on medical education. Among Yvonne's best-known work is her research on palliative care, looking at the educational needs of general practitioners helping to deliver it. This was followed in 2008 by a study on the knowledge needs of informal caregivers in palliative care.
From Liverpool, Yvonne had gone to Keele on a research training fellowship in 1990, and thence to Birmingham in 1992 as a senior clinical lecturer. In 1996 she became the youngest professor of general practice in the UK: appointed to the chair at Barts and the London NHS trust, she became director of the Institute of Community Health Sciences at Queen Mary's School of Medicine and Dentistry.
In 2003, Yvonne moved to Warwick, becoming dean the following year. Despite increased responsibilities as the university's pro-vice-chancellor for external affairs from 2007, she never looked tired on duty, and always had time to greet a student or a member of staff.
Involved in developing national strategy on research governance, she was a governor of the Health Foundation (1999-2007), and in 1998 a founder fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences. She always sought to facilitate the route to higher academic roles for women doctors, and earlier this year was appointed CBE for services to medical education. In Coventry, where she was vice-chair of the NHS trust, she instilled a vision of what it means to be a university teaching hospital.
Yvonne's cancer was diagnosed in 2003. She was open about her illness in a Guardian interview in 2005, and took early retirement only last July. She will be remembered as warm, approachable and fair-minded, and leaves Michael, their son, Christopher, and her sister, Alma.
• Yvonne Helen Carter, academic and general practitioner, born 16 April 1959; died 20 October 2009
