Stephen R. Connor PhD

Stephen R. Connor, Ph.D. is the Executive Director of the London, UK-based Worldwide Hospice Palliative Care Alliance (WHPCA), an alliance of national and regional hospice and palliative care organizations worldwide. After serving for 11 years in the leadership of the National Hospice and Palliative Care Organization (US), he is now focusing on palliative care development internationally with the WHPCA. He also serves as Senior Research Fellow for Capital Caring in the Washington Area.

Dr. Connor has worked continuously in the hospice/palliative care movement since 1975, as the CEO of four different US hospice programs. In addition to being a hospice and association executive, he is a researcher, advocate, educator, and psychotherapist, licensed as a clinical psychologist in two states. Dr. Connor’s areas of research interest in palliative care include bereavement, denial in the terminally ill, outcome and performance measurement, and evidence-based care for the dying. He has chaired the board of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, & Bereavement, served on the boards of the ADEC, the ICPCN, the Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Foundation, is on the Scientific Advisory Board for the National Palliative Care Research Center, and serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. For the last 18 years, Dr. Connor has been working on palliative care development internationally in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin America. He has published over 125 peer-reviewed journal articles, reviews, & book chapters on issues related to palliative care for patients and their families and is the author of Hospice: Practice, Pitfalls, and Promise (1998), Hospice and Palliative Care: The Essential Guide (2009 & 2018), and co-editor of the Global Atlas of Palliative Care at the End of Life (2013), a joint WHO and WHPCA publication and Building Integrated Palliative Care Programs and Services (2017).