Sheila R. Enders, MSW is an Assistant Clinical Professor with the Department of Internal Medicine at the UC Davis Medical Center.  She was Program Manager for the UC Davis/Sacramento AIDS Education and Training Center (AETC) for 10 years and currently serves as a consultant and faculty member for the AETC.  Sheila has worked in the area if HIV disease and AIDS for the past 15 years, coordinating investigational clinical drug trials, co-facilitating community support groups, and provides HIV/AIDS education to medical and mental health care practitioners.  She has served on many community task forces, committees and workgroups.  Currently, Sheila is on the Board of Directors for the Hand-to-Hand Foundation, a non-profit group offering emotional and practical support to people living with HIV and AIDS.

She is on the faculty for the West Coast Center for Palliative Education and Research (WCCPER).  As a faculty member and researcher with WCCPER, she has assisted in grant writing and provided in-home psychosocial support to advanced cancer patients receiving investigational treatment as part of a research grant from The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and served as a member of the Simultaneous Care team. She is an invited lecturer and trainer on end-of-life issues. Sheila has six years experience as a hospice social workers and has authored or co-authored numerous abstracts and articles on HIV/AIDS and palliative care.

OVERVIEW OF PDIA SOCIAL WORK LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT AWARD

Social workers become involved and often play a pivotal role when death seems likely. They facilitate discussions among physicians, patients and families in clarifying treatment goals.  These communications can be impeded when the patient is illiterate, has mild cognitive deficits or exhibits the effects of aging. Vulnerable populations are comprised of people who lack control over various parts of their lives.  Incarcerated populations exist in a controlled environment in which they have next to no autonomy.  Therefore inmates and the prison setting are appropriate for the introduction and testing of a new approach to advance health care planning and end-of-life decision-making.  This project will identify barriers to communicating advance health care decisions for vulnerable populations; develop a handbook using pictographs to assist in understanding and making those decisions; and, provide a teaching module to teach graduate level social work students the skills to initiate and facilitate discussions about end of life. The handbook will be made available to multiple medical settings for use with vulnerable populations with limited literacy skills.