Dr Barbara Stilwell

PhD FRCN

Barbara Stilwell is a Senior Scientist in the Human Resource for Health Department at the World Health Organization in Geneva. Her current area of interest is the impact of global issues on the health workforce, specialising in education and the supply and demand factors that affect performance.

Barbara was one of the first nurse practitioners in the UK. Between 1982 and 1990 she had several appointments as a research fellow in nursing studies. In 1991 she became a principal lecturer at the Institute of Advanced Nursing Education at the RCN, and between 1995 and 1997, as Programme Director at the RCN, she advised at government level on health care issues. After a short time at the Expanded Programme for Immunisation at the WHO, she joined the Human Resources for Health Department in 1998.

At present she is actively involved in enabling health workers in low-income countries to manage implementation of health programmes, despite having limited resources and coming under increasing pressure "to do more with less". She has also developed strategies within the WHO for better information dissemination.

Her influences stretch across continents from Professor Dame June Clark, former RCN General Secretary Christine Hancock and Professor Michael Drury (Professor of General Practice at Birmingham in the 1980s) to colleagues from the US "who showed me what nurses could achieve".

Barbara is most proud of persevering with the nurse practitioner concept and programme. In the future she wants to see a much clearer nursing contribution to health outcomes acknowledged with the move into different technological and epidemiological times.

She lives in Geneva.

Publications

Barbara Stilwell is a member of the Editorial Board of Clinical Excellence for Nurse Practitioners, the official publication of NPACE (Nurse Practitioner Associates for Continuing Education). Her list of publications is long and wide-ranging. Among recent work available on the Internet, she lists:

Contributor to the report of the Joint Learning Initiative on Human Resources for Health (2004) (http://www.globalhealthtrust.org/Report.html )
Co-author of Migration of health workers from developing countries: strategic approaches to its management (2004) World Health
Organization Bulletin, Geneva (http://www.who.int/bulletin/volumes/82/8/en/ )
Co-author of Developing ethical and evidence based policy options in migration, (2003) Human Resources for Health (http://www.human-resources-health.com/)