Debra Parker Oliver, MSW, PhD
Director of Doctoral Studies and Associate Professor
University of Missouri School of Social Work
Debra Parker Oliver is Director of Doctoral Studies and Associate Professor at University of Missouri-Columbia School of Social Work. She has been involved in hospice care for over two decades first as a practitioner and now as a researcher. Her research interests include hospice practice and management, home care, and gerontology and she has nearly 40 articles in peer-reviewed journals.Debra was awarded a National Cancer Institute R-21 Grant Award as Principal Investigator in Patient and Family Participation in Hospice Interdisciplinary Teams, an innovative care strategy aimed at using videophone technology to bring cancer patients and their families into hospice care planning meetings. This is the first NCI grant ever awarded to the University of Missouri School of Social Work.
As director of a small hospice in Minnesota, she provided the leadership necessary for it to become the first free-standing Medicare certified program in Minnesota. She then went on to start Hands of Hope Hospice in Missouri and held other leadership positions in hospice for over ten years. More recently she was a winner of the 2003 Catherine Pouget Award for her contributions towards research on improving quality of life for the terminally ill. In 2004 Debra was selected as a Hartford Foundation Geriatric Social Work Faculty Scholar.
She received Social Work/Sociology dual degrees from Missouri Western State College and both her Master of Social Work Degree and Ph.D. from the University of Missouri.
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