Helen Flynn grew up in western New South Wales, where her father was a junior magistrate. The family moved from one town to another, so Helen spent her final years at school as a boarder at Santa Sabina Dominican Convent in Strathfield. After completing the Leaving Certificate, she was awarded a scholarship to attend Sydney University, where she lived at Sancta Sofia College, Camperdown.

Following her father’s advice to ‘do medicine, that’s a good sort of career for a woman,’ Helen enrolled at Sydney University Medical School, graduating MB BS in 1948. Her yearbook noted ‘her capacity to pass exams was outstanding [as was] her ability to stay up till all hours, then later respond to a call to the labour ward and still be alert the next morning.’ This was despite spending most of her undergraduate years at Arts lectures and playing bridge.

After doing some locum work and a bit of general practice, she married naval aviator Guy Beange. Moving around with her husband’s postings and having 6 children, she understandably wasn't able to practise for 13 years. But once the family returned to Sydney, an opportunity to revisit her career presented itself when Helen fronted up to Royal North Shore Hospital (RNSH) and asked to do a refresher course by attending outpatient clinics.

Finding it difficult to secure employment, Helen initially worked at Grosvenor Diagnostic Centre, assessing children with intellectual disability. Here, the medical officers were at the fringe of a revolution in genetics, constantly learning about recently discovered syndromes and how to identify these as the underlying causes of the conditions in the people they saw. Meeting the great geneticist Gillian Turner, who, along with others, had discovered the most frequent genetic cause, Fragile X Syndrome, led Helen into research. It became clear to her that the impacts of physical problems affected her patients’ outcomes as much as the intellectual.

Helen’s love for Latin, instilled in her at high school, was reflected in her ‘same delight in epidemiology, the closest thing I have found to thinking in Latin,’ which prompted her postgraduate studies in public health, completed with a part-time scholarship in 1975 at Sydney University. She applied epidemiology to the little-studied burden of disease in developmentally delayed patients, in whom she observed diverse chronic and complex health problems. She obtained a Research and Development Grant from the Commonwealth Department of Community Services and Health for the first population study of health disorders in people with intellectual disability. This showed that, of a random sample of 202 adults with intellectual disability, each had an average of 5.4 medical disorders, half of which hadn't previously been detected.

As she grew older, exercise and nutrition became a focus for Helen. Seeing the benefits of her own jogging regime, she began to wonder how exercise would work for people with a disability. In 1987, she obtained a Master of Public Health degree by doing a simple research project on this subject and then put the research into practice by opening a health promotion clinic for adults with developmental disability at Royal North Shore Hospital. This was further enhanced by the arrival of a dietitian, Lyn Stewart, and an exercise physiologist, Caroline Bruce, who used nutrition and exercise to improve health outcomes.

When Royal North Shore Hospital enforced retirement on Helen at the age of 65, she became a medical officer at the Stockton Centre, a large institution for people with intellectual disability. Once again, she recruited Lyn Stewart, whose recommended diet led to significant improvements in weight, serum calcium and vitamin D levels, and haematological indicators for residents.

In 2002, Helen, along with colleagues Dr Seeta Durvasula and Wesley Baker, published a seminal paper which showed that adults with intellectual disability died 20 years younger than the general population.

Helen was the founding chair of the NSW-based Association of Doctors in Developmental Disability (ADIDD), which lobbied for people with disabilities and their need for specialised health services. As it became obvious that this was a nation-wide problem, the Australian Association of Developmental Disability Medicine (AADDM) was formed in 2002, with the aim to establish national standards in healthcare delivery.

Recognising that she had been fortunate to be present at the beginning of a new branch of medicine, it is also clear that this branch was fortunate to be part of Helen’s ‘unplanned career’ as a champion of intellectual disability health.

Dr Helen Beange became a Member of the Order of Australia (AM) in 2004