Sue Skillman, ms

Susan Skillman is the Deputy Director of the University of Washington’s Rural Health Research Center and Center for Health Workforce Studies. Through those Centers she is involved in many regional and national studies of the health workforce, including many studies of the nurse workforce. Ms. Skillman’s recent research topics include examining the characteristics of the rural nurse workforce, studies of Wyoming's health workforce and identification of policy options to improve access to care, projecting supply and demand for RNs and LPNs in Washington State, quantifying regional hospital staffing demands, projecting regional supply and demand of dental hygienists, pharmacists and radiographers, and studying the effects of the federal Workforce Investment Act on the nation’s health workforce. She also is part of the team evaluating HRSA’s distance education programs for rural RN-to-BSN students, and is collaborating on updates to HRSA’s national RN supply and demand models. For ten years Ms. Skillman was project director for several different health services research projects at the University’s School of Public Health and Community Medicine, and for eight years she worked at the Center for Health Studies at Group Health Cooperative of Puget Sound. She has a B.A. from Whitman College and an M.S. from Washington State University.