Douglas P. Olsen, RN, PhD: Nurse Ethicist

Douglas P. Olsen, PhD, RN, comes to the Center from the Yale University School of Nursing where he taught for 13 years. His prior clinical career includes being the first person licensed as an advanced practice mental health nurse in Alaska where he worked for the Indian Health Service and then the Southeast Alaska Regional Health Corporation, a Native health corporation.

His PhD in Nursing is from Boston College; he also has a Master’s in psychiatric nursing from the University of Washington, and Bachelor’s degrees from Hunter College and the Pennsylvania State University. He is the Assistant Editor of Nursing Ethics and Contributing Editor for Ethics at The American Journal of Nursing. His publications have appeared in a variety of professional journals including Psychiatric Services, Nursing Research, Journal of Clinical Ethics and Advances in Nursing Science.

He is a founding member of the International Centre for Nursing Ethics, Guildford, UK. In the fall of 2004 Dr. Olsen was awarded a Fulbright Fellowship and spent a semester in Russia lecturing on health care ethics to advanced nursing students at the Sechenov Moscow Medical Academy.

His approach to teaching psychiatric nursing and understanding ethics in health care combines the humanities with science to further our ability to fully appreciate patients as human beings and their histories as life stories in service of developing ethical and therapeutic relationships. His areas of expertise include research ethics, ethics in psychiatric nursing and the ethics of health care relationships.