Susan M. Lee, PhD, RN, CNP
Senior Nurse Scientist, Center for Nursing Excellence
Brigham and Women’s Hospital
slee40@partners.org
Dr. Lee, a Caring Science Scholar, is a Senior Nurse Scientist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, ranked 13th in the nation by US News and World Report. Her area of expertise is geriatric palliative care and she is the author of the Geriatric Caring Model, a situation-specific theory that guides care of older adults in their last few years of life. Working within the Caritas field, the clinician aims to achieve well-being for older persons and their families through caring interventions within four domains: aligning care, keeping safe, comforting body/mind/spirit, and facilitating transitions. Dr. Lee maintains a geropalliative practice as an APRN which “feeds her soul and her scholarship.”
Dr. Lee is also an expert in nursing workforce development, an area in which she has received over $2 million in funding from the Health Resources and Services Administration, GSA, and other sources to build nursing capacity in geropalliative care, ethics, and evidence-based practice. As a Caring Scholar, she is advancing/evolving a model for Caritas leadership that calls for a fundamental shift in the traditional role of management from power and authority to one that is kind, heart-centered and intentional. Dr. Lee just completed her first book with WCSI colleagues Dr. Patrick Palmieri and Dr. Jean Watson, entitled, Global Advances in Human Caring Literacy (Springer, 2016) which features stories from nurses all over the world who are using the theory of human caring in pedagogy, practice, education, research, and praxis.