The following apology was printed in the Guardian's Corrections and clarifications column, Monday February 19 2007
Muriel Skeet, the former chief nursing officer of the British Red Cross Society, was born in Colchester and went to Colchester County High School for Girls. Her middle name was Hilda, and in addition to a nephew, she is survived by a sister and a niece. Apologies.
Muriel Skeet, who has died aged 80, was a British nurse with a global outlook. As chief nursing officer of the British Red Cross Society (1970-78) she was active in promoting the training not only of Red Cross workers but also of those who cared for sick and elderly relatives and friends in their own homes. A prolific writer on nursing practice, she deplored the undervaluing of the profession and fought for its advancement - she herself trained as a nurse, epidemiologist and statistician - while encouraging nurses to base their practice on sound evidence.
Her career followed an unorthodox and sometimes nomadic pattern, and she saw herself as a backroom worker rather than a leader. Yet she was also a visionary, driven by a sharp intellect, wide reading and commitment to hard work. She could appear sardonic, even acerbic at times, as though reluctant to reveal her warmth and compassion.
Skeet was born in Suffolk and educated privately before entering Endsleigh House school in Colchester. Aged 18 when her fiance was killed in the second world war, she threw herself into training as a nurse at London's Middlesex hospital. Qualifying as a state-registered nurse in 1949, she worked there as a staff nurse, ward sister and administrative sister until 1960. She then realised that she did not want to go further into administration.
After a year out, doing private nursing in the south of France and in Rome - where she worked for the Agnelli family of Fiat fortune - she returned to England as a fieldwork organiser with the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, combining it with a one-year course in medical statistics and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine and, later, a three-month computer course at University College London.
She followed this with a research post at the Florence Nightingale Memorial Committee from 1965 to 1970, after which she worked for the World Health Organisation until she was 60, and was still working for it as a consultant in the 1990s. In 1977 she became a fellow of the Royal College of Nursing.
A great traveller, Skeet lectured and studied all over the world. In one four-month trip in 1972, she attended the opening of a new nursing school in Bangladesh, visited Delhi in India to arrange a symposium on nurse training and resource use, travelled to Hong Kong to organise Red Cross activities, to Sri Lanka to advise on nursing training, and to Cyprus to inspect a children's hospital.
For 25 years she did hands-on work in disaster areas such as Bangladesh, Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Niger, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and the Punjab in India. She led a trauma team in Turkey at the start of the first Gulf war. She would hold friends spellbound with her stories, including a memorable account of an assessment visit to a Kurdish refugee camp on the Turkish/Iraqi border in 1990, thanking providence that she had remembered to pack her wellies as she trudged through the rubbish and sewage. Her manual for relief work, published in 1975, is still consulted today.
Skeet was an early advocate for the development of the evidence base for health care. Always practical, she pursued this belief by producing studies and surveys both in this country and abroad. Waiting in Outpatients (1968) received widespread publicity and resulted in the introduction of appointment systems, while Marriage and Nursing, with Gertrude Ramsden (1967), resulted in staff creches for nurses.
Perhaps her best-known study was a follow-up of patients discharged from hospital. Home from Hospital (1970) showed the need for patients to be informed about their illnesses and for hospitals to know about patients' home circumstances. Skeet then became patron of the Home from Hospital charity.
Another study, Health Needs Help (1978), covered the role and preparation of volunteers working within the reorganised National Health Service.
Beyond the stream of papers, reports, books and monographs, Skeet served on numerous committees. She was chair of the Nursing Advisory Committee of the League of Red Cross Societies; the first president of the Commonwealth Nurses Federation and chairman of the board. She was also on the council of the Queen's Institute of District Nursing, the National Council of Nurses and the Florence Nightingale Memorial Committee.
Skeet wrote her own reflections on nursing past and present in a companion volume to Florence Nightingale's Notes on Nursing. "We have to maintain Miss Nightingale's firm sense of purpose, allied to contemporary scientific knowledge, and pass this on to people selectively chosen to bear the burden and savour the happiness and joy of professional service," she concluded.
Skeet's description of Nightingale as "a woman of vision and drive" was one that she could equally well have applied to herself. She is survived by a nephew.
· Muriel Harvey Skeet, nurse, born July 12 1926; died November 22 2006
