Muriel Skeet

Muriel Skeet FRCN (12 July 1926 – 22 November 2006) was a British nurse, known for her international work and publications.

Early life
Muriel Hilda Skeet was born in Colchester on 12 July 1926. Following a private education in Colchester, she then joined Endsleigh House School.

Nursing career
Skeet trained as a nurse at London's Middlesex Hospital in March 1945, qualifying as a state-registered nurse in 1949. She worked there as a staff nurse, ward sister and administrative sister until 1960.

Skeet then spent a year in the South of France and Rome carrying out private nursing including for the Agnelli family.

On her return to England, Skeet became a fieldwork organiser with the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust, now Nuffield Trust. During this time, she undertook a one-year course in medical statistics and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.

In 1965, Skeet went into a research post at the Florence Nightingale Memorial Committee of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, now known as the Florence Nightingale Foundation, until 1970. Works that she wrote at this time changed nursing practices: the popularity of her book Waiting in Outpatients caused appointment systems to be introduced, and Marriage and Nursing saw crèches introduced for nursing staff with young children. Home from Hospital was particularly influential in changing how patients were informed ready for discharge and in causing hospitals to investigate the circumstances that patients were being discharged to at home.

Skeet was the Nursing Advisor and Chief Nursing Officer (CNO) to the British Red Cross Society from 1970 until 1978. She conducted work in disaster areas for 25 years and her manual for relief work (1975) is still widely used.

After this, Skeet worked for the World Health Organization until she was 60, and then as a consultant until 1996.

Personal life and death
When Skeet was 18, her fiancé was killed in the World War II.

Skeet died at a nursing home in Exmouth, Devon, on 22 November 2006, at the age of 80.

Honours
Skeet was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Nursing in 1977.