Sheila Payne

Professor Sheila Payne is one of the best known authors writing about palliative care. She is a health psychologist with a background in nursing. She holds an Emeritus Chair at the International Observatory on End of Life Care at Lancaster University. During her career, she established and managed three research groups; the Health Research Group at the University of Southampton (1996-2000), the Palliative and End of Life Care Research Group, University of Sheffield (2003-2006) and the International Observatory on End of Life Care, Lancaster University (2009-2014). She was President of the European Association of Palliative Care (2011-2015). She has worked closely with the World Health Organisation ad hoc Technical Advisory Group on implementation of palliative care. She has also worked in collaboration with the WHO EMRO in supporting palliative care development in the Eastern Mediterranean Region, including assisting with the development of the first National Strategy for Palliative Care and Home Care in Jordan. She is a Salzburg Global Scholar and she was an invited participant of the ‘Rethinking end of life care’ seminar in December 2017. In April 2019, she was an invited speaker at the United Nations, New York, USA, reporting on outcomes of international research in improving palliative care for older people living in nursing homes. She designed and led two Massive Open Online Courses (MOOC) entitled ‘Improving Palliative Care in Care Homes’ (2019-2021) and ‘Dying Well: the role of palliative care and sedation’ (2023-2024) which were delivered to over 7000 participants from more than 110 countries. Professor Payne has a long track record in palliative care research and scholarship. Her research focuses on palliative and end-of-life care for older people. She has been involved in nine European Commission funded international projects. She has supervised over 40 PhD students. She has been appointed as external examiner to over 67 PhD candidates in the UK and internationally. She has published widely in academic and professional journals with over 600 outputs, and published 16 books.