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 400 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 an international palliative care consultant for the Open Society Foundations. He serves on several technical working groups of the World Health Organization (WHO) in Geneva.
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 Kübler-Ross Foundation and the International Children’s Palliative Care Network (ICPCN). Dr. Connor is on the editorial board of the Journal of Pain & Symptom Management and has published over 175 peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews, and 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.Twitter: @thewhpca