Kathleen Kovarik & Laurie Elston – Legal Risks and Ethical Dilemmas in Nursing

Laurie Elston, BSN, JD, is a Nurse Attorney with over 20 years of experience as an attorney. She received her Juris Doctorate, cum laude, from Gonzaga University, and was on Law Review. She has represented health care providers in malpractice and disciplinary cases throughout her career. She has also been a Municipal Court Judge Pro Tem. She has been licensed as an attorney in both California and Washington. Laurie maintains an active law practice: www.NursingLawCenter.com.

Prior to becoming an attorney, she obtained a BSN and worked as a registered nurse for over seven years in a large acute care medical center. During this time, she also worked as an assistant head nurse and charge nurse.

Since becoming an attorney, she has taught tort law at the University of Washington. She currently teaches Nursing Law classes across the country for groups and institutions. In addition, she teaches a Legal Nurse Consulting Training Course nationwide, and on DVD for home study. She is a frequent lecturer on medical-legal topics.

Kathleen Kovarik, PhD, RN, is an experienced clinician and educator with 17 years of teaching and lecturing in a variety of settings (schools of nursing, regional and national conferences, workshops and retreats). Her clinical experiences have taken her from a Level I Trauma Center Regional Burn Unit at Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, to summers working home care for Visiting Nurses in Spokane, WA, to launching a Parish Nursing program in Missoula, MT. Currently, Kathleen calls the Black Hills of South Dakota her home, where she serves as an Ethics Committee member for Regional Health in Rapid City, is the director of Faces of Leadership (leadership training and consultation), teaches Applied Health-Care Ethics for Regis University in Denver, and team-teaches an Interdisciplinary Palliative Care Course as clinical faculty for the University of South Dakota’s medical school.

Dr. Kovarik has pursued her love of ethics and has taught ethics content for many years in her faculty positions with Washington State University and South Dakota State University. Her work in a Level I Trauma Center/Burn Unit and in home care/parish nursing gives her a broad- spectrum viewpoint and rich experiences to share. She developed expertise in pain management and end-of-life care, and was selected to serve on the Board of the Washington-Alaska State Cancer Pain Initiative and to do a fellowship with the University of Colorado in pediatric pain management.