vailsymposium

Monica Williams, MD is an award-winning writer and board-certified emergency physician with expertise in Death and Dying and medical directives. She practices in one the largest Emergency Departments in the nation at Huntsville Hospital, where she also serves the community as the Medical Director for Advanced Care Planning and End of Life Education and lectures internationally. Additionally, she has served on the board of directors for multiple not-for-profit hospices and co-authored two Alabama State Laws supporting terminally ill minors living in the community setting.

She is faculty for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine, Long Beach VA Medical Center in California and is an appointee to the American College of Emergency Physicians End-of-Life task force. Her writing, speaking and advocacy focuses on empowering patients and families in critical and end-of-life decision-making and her consulting work centers on the same, although the leading edge of her work is to create dialogue around the exceptional states of consciousness that may occur at the end of life. She serves as the Medical Advisor to the Shared Crossing Research Initiative, the leading research organization studying end of life phenomena.

Her book, “It’s OK to Die” and companion website are tools for transforming the end of life into a time of peace, closure and healing. Dr. Williams has appeared in local and national media as a Medical Expert, including the Emmy Award-winning show, “The Doctors” and The Washington Post and her blog has also appeared in the New York Times, Health Around the Web Column. Her end-of-life preparation checklists have been adopted by the UCLA Healthcare System and the UK’s NHS campaign, Be Ready for It! endorsed by the Norfolk and Suffolk Palliative Care Academy.