Stephen R. Connor PhD
Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance
Stephen R. Connor, Ph.D. is the Executive
Director of the London, UK based charity, the Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care
Alliance (WHPCA), an alliance of over 350 national and regional hospice and
palliative care organizations in over 100 countries worldwide. Dr. Connor has
worked continuously in the hospice/palliative care movement since 1975 and has
been the CEO of four US hospice programs. After serving for 11 years as
vice-president of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (US),
he is now focused on palliative care development internationally with the WHPCA
and has worked on palliative care globally in over 27 countries including as
international palliative care consultant for the Open Society Foundations. He
serves on several technical working groups of the World Health Organization
(WHO) in Geneva. Connor also serves as Senior Research Scholar to Capital
Caring Health in the Washington DC Area.
In addition to being a hospice and association
executive, he is a researcher, educator, advocate, and psychotherapist,
licensed as a clinical psychologist in California. Dr Connor’s areas of
research interest in palliative care include bereavement, denial, outcome
measurement and evidence-based care for the dying. He has chaired the board of
the International Work Group on Death, Dying, & Bereavement, is on the
Scientific Advisory Board for the National Palliative Care Research Center, and
is a member of the board of the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation and the
International Children’s Palliative Care Network. Dr Connor is on the editorial
board of the Journal of Pain & Symptom Management and has published
over 145 peer reviewed journal articles, reviews, & book chapters on issues
related to palliative care for patients and their families. He is the author of
Hospice: Practice, Pitfalls, and Promise (1998), Hospice and
Palliative Care: The Essential Guide (2009 & 2018), and editor of Building
Integrated Palliative Care Programs and Services (2017) and the Global
Atlas of Palliative Care (2014 & 2020), a WHPCA publication in partnership with the WHO.