Geoffrey Rivett was educated at Manchester Grammar School, Brasenose College Oxford, and University College Hospital.  After house jobs and national service in the RAMC he joined an innovative and rapidly growing general practice in Buckinghamshire in 1960.  In 1972 he entered the Department of Health and worked in three fields closely connected with the NHS.  These were the introduction of computers into medicine (1972-1976), the planning and management of health services in London and the south-east (1976-1985), and the refashioning of the contractual and quality framework of general practice and primary health care at the time of the NHS reforms (1985-1992).  As a civil servant it was his task to argue in turn for NHS reorganisation, planning and co-terminosity (1974); restructuring on a district basis (1982); the general management function (1984); and the Conservatives' NHS reforms (1989).  

During the eighties and early nineties, while at the Department of Health, he visited the US regularly to study ideas that might be suitable for transfer to the UK. He visited Kaiser Permanente and other HMOs, and centres of expertise in quality, accreditation and nurse practitioner training. He was never far from the medical and political firing line.