Lecturer: Susan Hickman, Ph.D
Objectives:
- Describe state variations in end-of-life care.
- Identify strengths and weaknesses of strategies to honor treatment preferences.
- Learn about findings from a multi-state study of the Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment (POLST) Program.
Dr. Hickman is an Associate Professor in the Environments for Health Department at the Indiana University School of Nursing. She received her undergraduate degree from Wellesley College and doctorate in psychology from the University of Kansas. Dr. Hickman completed fellowship training in geropsychology from the Portland Veterans Affairs Medical Center and completed additional postdoctoral training in clinical ethics through the University of Washington School of Medicine Certificate Program in Health Care Ethics in 2001. Prior to relocating to Indiana, she was on faculty at the Oregon Health & Science University School of Nursing and was a Senior Scholar in the Center for Ethics in Health Care. She also served as a co-chair of the OHSU Institutional Review Board and is a member of the National POLST (Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment) Paradigm Task Force.
Dr. Hickman’s research focuses on ethical issues in end-of-life care and in research. Her work in end-of-life care includes a federally funded multi-state study on use of the POLST in nursing facilities. The POLST is designed to document patient treatment preferences in the form of immediately actionable medical orders that follow the patient throughout the healthcare system. Programs based on this model are currently being used or in development in approximately 30 states, but it is currently not available in Indiana. Dr. Hickman also has federal funding to study the effect of ethical concerns on the conduct of end-of-life research, building on prior work supported by The Greenwall Foundation to evaluate ethical issues in community-based research. Her research has been published in the Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, the Journal of Palliative Medicine, and the Journal of Law, Medicine, and Ethics.
The Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics sponsors the Fairbanks Ethics Lecture Series as an educational outreach to physicians and staff of Clarian Health hospitals and interested others in the central Indiana community. Lectures are free, open to all, and do not require pre-registration. Continuing education credit is offered to physicians, nurses, social workers, and chaplains at no charge, regardless of their institutional affiliation.
For questions and comments, please contact Amy Chamness at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or (317)962-1721. For additional information about the Charles Warren Fairbanks Center for Medical Ethics, please visit our website at www.fairbankscenter.org.