She is a retired teacher with a soft Welsh accent and lives in Rickmansworth, Hertfordshire. But the mere mention of Jean Brett's name has hardened NHS bosses reaching for their angina tablets.
For more than four years, Brett and a small group of volunteers have waged a guerrilla war to stop the closure of the renowned Harefield heart hospital and stall one of the most ambitious and expensive building projects in NHS history.
By 2014, Harefield - home of transplant pioneer Sir Magdi Yacoub - is due to be uprooted from 44 acres of Hertfordshire to become part of the Paddington Health Campus in west London, which will also house St Mary's Hospital, the Royal Brompton and Harefield trust and the medical research arm of Imperial College.
The project, initially costed at £360m in 1999, hit an early snag. The wards were too small to comply with NHS privacy regulations.
Since then, the project has stalled trying to secure more land to satisfy the planners. Its problems have been recounted in the media - frequently tipped off by Brett - but also in scathing official reports by government auditors.
Last week, with a projected cost of £1.1bn, £7m spent on consultants fees and no signed-off deal in sight, Brett unleashed a daisycutter. A secret appendix to the latest outline business case reveals that the NHS will have to pay the owners of the site £99m for extra land - 32% above the market value. The hospital would also pay £9.1m a year until 2008 in compensation for not building an office complex on the site.
"This project has been flawed from the outset," Brett says. "Now we can see that it is not value for money, it is not affordable and staff do not want it. You can see that by the amount of confidential material I get from senior people in the NHS in London.
"I know some wonderful senior NHS managers - I don't name names because it wouldn't make them too popular. But so many middle-ranking managers fear speaking out against the idiocy of central NHS plans being pushed through by senior managers just because they are afraid of going against the system."
So why are managers afraid to speak out? "Where else is there for them to go?" Brett asks. "If they rock the boat, they know their careers are over."
Brett brushes off jibes that she is anti-progress, a mere parochial meddler. "Patients come to Harefield from all over the world for its heart surgery," she says. "Paddington says it will combine beds and research. We are already doing that and it would be vandalism to destroy it."
