Stephen R. Connor, Ph.D. is the Senior Executive of the newly formed Worldwide Palliative Care Alliance (WPCA), an alliance of national hospice and palliative care organizations worldwide. He also continues to serve as Senior Research and International Consultant to the National Hospice & Palliative Care Organization (NHPCO) in Alexandria, Virginia USA. After serving for 10 years with the leadership of NHPCO, he is now focusing on palliative care development internationally and also serves as a part time consultant to the Open Society Institute’s International Palliative Care Initiative.

Dr Connor has worked continuously in the hospice/palliative care movement since 1976, as the CEO of four different US hospice programs, and has been a consultant surveyor for the Joint Commission. In addition to being a hospice and association executive, he is a researcher and psychotherapist, licensed as a clinical psychologist in California and Kentucky. Dr Connor’s areas of research interest include: bereavement and health, denial in the terminally ill, outcome and performance measurement in end of life care, and evidence based care for the dying. He is the Chair of the WPCA Quality and Standards Workgroup, currently chairs the board of the International Work Group on Death, Dying, & Bereavement, is board treasurer of the Association for Death Education and Counseling and serves as a member of the Editorial Board of the Journal of Pain and Symptom Management. For the last 10 years Dr. Connor has been working on palliative care development internationally in Sub-Saharan Africa, Eastern Europe, Asia, and Latin American. Dr Connor has published over 50 peer reviewed journal articles, reviews, and book chapters on issues related to palliative care for patients and their families and is the author of Hospice: Practice, Pitfalls, and Promise (1998), and the just published book Hospice and Palliative Care: The Essential Guide (2009).