Eileen Bumphrey née Rogers was born in 1936, one of the nine children of Edith Cuthbert (1891-1960) and Ebenezer William Rogers (1892-1977), a noted preacher among the Plymouth Brethren. She trained at the Derby School of Occupational Therapy, 1955-1958, and worked in Leicester, Surrey and Oxford.

From December 1965 to February 1967 Eileen worked at the Bethseda Leprosy Hospital in Narsapur, Andhra Pradesh, India, a hospital of the West Godavari Mission, delivering training in occupational therapy and other para-medical services. Her elder sister, Olive (1922-2013), a teacher, had joined the West Godavari Mission in 1949 and remained there for 35 years.

Eileen later worked for the World Health Organisation as consultant occupational therapist to the Taiwan government and undertook further research projects in Oxford. In the 1970s she was chairman of the British Association of Occupational Therapists and the first chairman of the College of Occupational Therapists. She was on the working party which established the first university course for occupational therapists at the University of East Anglia. She died in 2018.