Dr. Seaman has expertise in the areas of critical care, palliative care, gerontology, and bioethics, along with skills in qualitative methods, intervention fidelity, and implementation science. She teaches ethics in the School of Nursing and for the University Center for Social and Urban Research. Her research program centers on advancing primary palliative care—the integration of palliative care principles and practices in the care of patients—particularly in the area of communication and support for families of incapacitated patients. Her research applies principles from implementation science and organizational behavior to the development of a scalable intervention to ensure that timely interprofessional family meetings are held for critically ill ICU patients. She has studied measures of nursing care quality and patterns of palliative care consultation for mechanically ventilated ICU patients, hospice and family involvement in end-of-life care, and the prevalence of advance directives among older adults admitted to the ICU.
