Postgraduate prospectus

Staff profile

Prof Suzanne Skevington
PhD, C Psychol, FBPsS
Professor of Health Psychology

Suzie Skevington holds a Personal Chair in Health Psychology at the University of Bath where she is also Director of the World Health Organisation Centre for the Study of Quality of Life. Since 1991, she has been a consultant to the World Health Organisation (WHO) and UNAIDS in Geneva. She is a lead in the work of the WHOQOL Group* which is a WHO collaboration, dedicated to the crosscultural understanding of quality of life in health and health care. This project now operates in 58 countries worldwide. She has interests in public health psychology; as a Fulbright Scholar in 1995, she was resident in the School of Public Health, Univ. of Washington and in 2004 she was academic visitor at the Univ. of Oxford Department of Public Health. She has been Chair/Deputy of the British Psychological Society, Division of Health Psychology (2000-3), and represented the Society at ministerial meetings to discuss the funding of postgraduate training in health psychology at the Department of Health, and at 10 Downing Street. The University of Bath is known for its scientist-practitioner training in health psychology through its programme at Masters level which has thrived since 1996.

She is well known for her research in international health, the assessment and conceptualisation of quality of life and well-being in health and health care and cross-cultural psychology. As part of a European Union funded collaboration between 22 countries, the WHOQOL-Old group investigated how active ageing can affect quality of life in the UK. The Alzheimer’s Society has supported two studies on how best to assess quality of life in early dementia which presented interesting methodological challenges. Other lifespan research with postgraduates includes quality of life in young children and adolescents. In work with WHO and UNAIDS, 9 countries have investigated how HIV and AIDS affect health-related quality of life, and modelling has indicated which aspects are most important. Recent publications are on social inequalities, and on the quality of life of poor people in 4 countries (ESRC funded). Professor Skevington has a growing interest in positive psychology and has looked at the impact of spiritual, religious and personal beliefs on quality of life and how these different cultural models are constructed. In contrast to ongoing work on large data sets, she is currently interested in how quality of life information can be used by patients and health professionals to better inform health care decision-making. She has longstanding interests in the reporting of symptoms, particularly chronic pain and breathlessness, and is author of ‘Psychology of Pain’ (Wiley, 1995/2009). She is co-author of 5 other volumes and has published around 120 peer-reviewed journal articles, chapters and official reports.

* www.bath.ac.uk/whoqol