Barbara Stilwell

If it weren’t for Barbara Stilwell, there might not be any nurse practitioners serving patients in England today. When Barbara was working in the inner city in Birmingham, UK, in the 1970s, she found that many local patients—most of them from India, Pakistan, or Bangladesh—had no one to consult about health issues that weren’t essentially medical except for the too-busy local general practitioners. Barbara won a scholarship to study in the United States to become a nurse practitioner. When she returned to the UK, she helped establish England’s first training program for nurse practitioners. In 2008, the UK’s Nursing Times named her one of the top 20 most influential nurses of the past 60 years. For the past 25 years, Barbara has worked overseas, first with the World Health Organization (WHO) and now with IntraHealth, as senior director of health workforce solutions.