Muriel Hilda Skeet, known to friends as “Mu”, was born in 1926 and educated in Colchester. After the death of her fiancé during the war, she started to train as a nurse in March 1945. Qualifying as SRN in 1949, she worked as a nurse, ward and administration sister at the Middlesex Hospital for a dozen years. This was followed by a spell of private nursing in the South of France, and in Rome where she worked for the Agnelli family.

Returning to England, she took a one-year course in medical statistics and epidemiology at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, followed by three months of computer training at University College Hospital. She then embarked upon a career in research and the development of ideas about nursing and healthcare.

In 1963 she was appointed field work organiser with the Nuffield Provincial Hospitals Trust and in 1966 became research organiser for the Florence Nightingale Memorial Committee, with Leverhulme Fellowships in 1968 and 1973.

The steady stream of books, monographs, reports and articles she produced was matched by assiduous and skilful promotion of their content. Much of the material was produced in her bold, looping longhand — she never learnt to type, having been advised that doing so ran the risk of her losing her secretary in the event of cutbacks.

Among her early works were Waiting in Outpatients (1965) which was instrumental in the introduction of outpatients appointment systems, Marriage and Nursing (1968, with Gertrude Ramsden) which influenced the creation of hospital crèches and part-time employment for married nurses, and Home from Hospital (1970) which highlighted the need for patients to be provided with information about their illnesses, and for staff to know about patients’ domestic situations and home-care needs.

She examined core nursing and healthcare issues in such works as Emergency Procedures and First Aid for Nurses (1981) and Care and Safe Use of Hospital Equipment (1995, with with David Frear), and considered her profession from a historical perspective in The Art of Nursing, 1858 and 1978, and A History of Nursing at the Middlesex Hospital, 1745-1990 (2000, with Monica Baly).

She pursued yet other strands of thought dealing with the need to look at the provision of healthcare in the family and community and the use of auxiliaries in such publications as Home Nursing (1975, with Jean Stroud), Health Auxiliaries and the Health Team (1978, with Catherine Elliot) and Health Needs Help (1977, with Elizabeth Crout). And she examined the problems of age and ageing in The Third Age (1982), a guide to the financial, legal and social aspects of old age.

From 1970 to 1978 she served as chief nursing officer to the British Red Cross Society. This ran parallel to her work as a consultant and adviser to the World Health Organisation, from 1969 to the early 1990s.

Amid this notable and wide-ranging activity she found time to act as chairman of, among other bodies, the advisory committee of the League of Red Cross Societies (1972-77) and she was the first president of the Commonwealth Nurses Federation (1972-77). She also acted as adviser to the British Council and Overseas Development Administration on nursing and healthcare matters (1979-89).

She was also actively involved in the assessment, development and promotion of nursing and nurse training around the world.

An elegant and cultivated woman, she was described in The Times in 1972 as: “an extraordinary cross between Florence Nightingale and a walking computer”. For all her activity, Skeet always showed a deep warmth in her dealings with individuals and a profound humanitarianism.

Her work involved much travel — once she was even shipwrecked and found herself in an open boat in the company of the ship’s cook, after which ordeal she vowed never to travel by sea again.

For almost two and a half decades she was actively engaged in the organisation and provision of medical and humanitarian relief to the victims of natural and man-made disasters.

In 1971, at the behest of the League of Red Cross Societies, she worked in the delivery of aid to Bangladesh which had endured war, floods, cyclones and famine. Similar work followed in Cambodia, Laos, Ethiopia, Niger, the Philippines, Sri Lanka and the Punjab. She drew on her experience in this field to write her Manual for Disaster Relief Work (1977), a 400-page compendium whose text and illustrations are suitable for the squeamish.

Two decades on from Bangladesh, Skeet led a trauma team in southeast Turkey at the start of the first Gulf War. Her staff was augmented in short order by a chemical/biological warfare team and, with the arrival of Kurdish refugees over the mountains from north Iraq, water engineers, dieticians and experts in limb prosthesis. The latter were needed because food parcels had been dropped near minefields with disastrous results.

In 1993-94, and aged almost 68, she was in civil war-torn Angola leading a 12-strong team which ran clinics in two towns. One was held by Unita and surrounded by government forces; at the other the reverse. Sleeping in bombed-out ruins, living off wild fruit, Skeet and her team spent hours cowering under tables while gunfire raged around them. Eventually she decided to evacuate, leading the team through two hostile roadblocks — easing their way through the second by donating a tin of glucose sweets to the soldiers manning it.

In retirement Skeet could devote her time to more peaceful pursuits: she was active in the English Speaking Union and the National Association of Decorative and Fine Arts Societies.

Skeet did not marry. Although her work and achievements did not receive public recognition in the honours system, they were widely acknowledged by colleagues and fellow professionals from the many fields to which she contributed.

Muriel Skeet, Chief Nursing Officer, British Red Cross Society, 1970-78, was born on July 12, 1926. She died on November 22, 2006, aged 80