Geoffrey Rivett has been involved with the NHS throughout his life, qualifying at Oxford and University College Hospital, before working as a general practitioner, in the Department of Health and more recently as vice chair of the governors at a foundation trust in London.

His departmental duties in regional liaison showed him the NHS as a complex system and led to his first book on the different types of hospital in London, and his second on the clinical and organisational history of the NHS. He speaks on the evolution of the service, most recently to two groups of U.S. students from North Carolina and Southern Mississippi.