136 It's Ok to Die with Monica Williams, M.D.

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 has lectured coast to coast in the US. Additionally, she has served on the board of directors for multiple not-for-profit hospices. She is Faculty for the University of Alabama at Birmingham’s School of Medicine, and is an appointee to the American College of Emergency Physicians End-of-Life taskforce. 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 future direction of her work will incorporate more spiritual elements. 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., 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 UCLA’s Center for Integrative Oncology and the UK’s NHS campaign, Be Ready for It! endorsed by the Norfolk and Suffolk Palliative Care Academy. In 2013, she was a winner of the national Costs of Care essay contest. To buy the book and learn more about Dr. Williams’s work, visit www.oktodie.com.

Dr. Williams’s social media campaign for raising awareness of her work reaches thousands through: Opt-in Blog followers, Facebook http://www.facebook.com/OKtoDie, Twitter https://twitter.com/Oktodie, and Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/pub/monica-williams-murphy-md/46/74b/398