Sheila Leatherman’s professional experience stretches across the breadth of health care management, public health and health policy. She has expertise in quality of care, performance improvement in the health sector, health systems reforms and humanitarian health. She has worked with over 50 countries in Europe, Africa, Asia, Latin America and North America, and she spent nearly two decades evaluating the National Health Service in the United Kingdom. Her research and policy analysis involves developing methods to monitor health system performance and advising governments and nonprofit organizations on strategy and interventions to systematically improve access and quality of health care delivery.
As a lead advisor to the World Health Organization since 2015, Leatherman has developed the academic and technical frameworks and tools for WHO support of member states into improving health care services and outcomes around the world. The program, known as NQPS (National Quality Policy and Strategy), produces guidance and provides technical support to ministries of health worldwide. In May 2020, the UN/WHO Global Polio Eradication Initiative appointed her to the Polio Transition Independent Monitoring Board, where she served four years.
Leatherman joined the University of North Carolina’s Gillings School of Global Public Health in 2000 as a professor of global health policy and has been a distinguished associate at Darwin College, Cambridge University, since 1997. At the University of North Carolina Gillings School, she founded the Humanitarian Health Initiative, which supports large and small nonprofit organizations in multiple countries performing monitoring and evaluation and advising on program implementation. She also has been a visiting professor at the London School of Economics and at Radboud University in the Netherlands. From 1998 to 2006, she was a senior advisor to the Nuffield Trust, an independent health care policy and research center in the UK, and she later served as a trustee.
Leatherman has received numerous awards and distinctions. She was elected as a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences’ Academy of Medicine in 2002 and as an honorary fellow of the Royal College of Physicians in 2005. In 2007, she was named a Commander of the British Empire by Queen Elizabeth II for her research and policy contributions to the National Health Service.
Leatherman joined the FHI 360 board of directors in November 2021.