Barbara Fawkes

Who is Barbara Fawkes?

Barbara Noel Fawkes, OBE, FRCN was a British nurse and nursing educator. She served as Chief Education Officer, General Nursing Council for England and Wales from 1959 to 1974.

She trained as a nurse and midwife at the Middlesex Hospital, London, which was evacuated to Buckinghamshire during World War II. In 1954 she received a Red Cross scholarship to study education and administration at Columbia University, where she was graduated, earning her B.Sc. She went on to tour Commonwealth hospitals in Canada, Australia and New Zealand. She left the Middlesex Hospital in 1956 to begin her career in nursing education, which she began as chief education officer with the General Nursing Council, from which she retired in 1974.

In 1984 she organised the International Cancer Nurses Conference in Melbourne, Australia, for which services she was later awarded an honorary fellowship in the Royal College of Nursing of New South Wales.