Know Your Wishes
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Dr. Van Scoy is a practicing Pulmonary and Critical Care physician and Assistant Professor of Medicine at Penn State Milton S. Hershey Medical Center. She is also a writer, researcher, speaker, wife and mother.
Early on in her medical residency years, Dr. Van Scoy developed an interest in critical care with a focus on end-of-life issues. Facing critically ill patients on a daily basis in the intensive care unit, she found herself developing a deep emotional attachment to her patients and their families as she participated in their care during the end of life. She developed as knowyourwishes.com as a platform to help future patients and their families prepare for inevitable end-of-life decisions and challenges. Dr. Van Scoy's book, Last Wish: Stories to Inspire a Peaceful Passing was published in 2011 and tells the compelling true stories of six patients as they encounter and face critical illness. Dr. Van Scoy, partnered with C-TAC (the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care) and serves as Executive Editor for the upcoming Care Chronicles, a blog sharing personal stories, to be launched in October 2013. Dr. Van Scoy has also done free-lance writing in a multitude of different venues.
Her research work is focused on creating innovative tools to supplement traditional advance directives and assist patients and families through the process of end-of-life planning. Dr. Van Scoy also does research in the ICU, investigating factors associated with the quality of death and dying in the ICU, advance directives, how factors such as race, gender and disease entity impacts end-of-life decisions and quality of death and dying in the ICU. Dr. Van Scoy has published and presented her research at several international meetings.
Dr. Van Scoy grew up in Doylestown, Pennsylvania and completed her medical school, Internal Medicine residency and Pulmonary and Critical Care fellowship in Philadelphia at Drexel University College of Medicine. She also served as Chief Resident and Chief Fellow at the same institution before joining the faculty at Penn State University Hershey Medical Center. She, her husband and son currently live in Hershey, Pennsylvania.
About the Author
Lauren Van Scoy, M.D.
