Dr. Susan Hickman
Susan Hickman, PhD, is a geropsychologist, Professor in the Indiana University (IU) School of Nursing and IU School of Medicine, Cornelius and Yvonne Pettinga Chair in Aging Research, and Director of the IU Center for Aging Research at Regenstrief Institute, Inc., as well as a Co-Director of the Research in Palliative and End-of-Life Communication and Training (RESPECT) Center.
Dr. Hickman has been educating and conducting research on advance care planning and end-of-life decision making with a focus on the nursing facility since 1998.
She is currently the Co-Principal Investigator on a National Institute on Aging (NIA) pragmatic randomized clinical trial to evaluate an advance care planning program for the caregivers of nursing home residents with Alzheimer’s Disease and related dementias as well as a bioethics supplement to explore family experiences with these conversations. Dr. Hickman is also a co-investigator on two NIA-funded trials that include advance care planning interventions. She recently completed a grant funded by the National Institutes of Nursing Research to evaluate the quality of advance care planning decisions in the nursing facility setting by assessing concordance between current preferences and existing documentation.
As a co-founder and leader in the Indiana Patient Preferences Coalition community stakeholder group, she has championed the nearly unanimous passage of four end-of-life decision-making statutes in the Indiana General Assembly over the past decade.