La Vera Crawley

My work as a Project Advisor for Synthesis Projects in the MA Leadership Program is recursive. I draw from the full curriculum -- a focus on values, adaptive leadership, sustainable change, and collaborative learning -- to guide my strategies as coach, resource person, standard bearer, and cheerleader as learners, in turn, navigate their own values, leadership, and inquiry skills toward completion of their projects. I bring to this work over 35 years of work in the medical world as clinician, program director, educator, researcher, and most recently, chaplain.

In the field of medicine and ethics, I am internationally known for my work on health disparities for palliative and end-of-life (EOL) care. I served as an expert on racial, ethnic, and cultural issues for the 2004 NIH State-of-the-Science of EOL Care Consensus Conference; was commissioned by the California Healthcare Foundation to conduct an in-depth summary of EOL health care delivery for California’s multi-ethnic, multicultural, and racially diverse population; and served a 3-year appointment as an ethics advisor for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After a 16+ year career at Stanford as an empirical bioethicist, I embarked on a new career in the art of spiritual companionship as a Hospital Chaplain. This work brings together a wide range of skills, knowledge, experiences, interests, and charisms in medicine, ethics, social justice, teaching, research, public health, and spirituality allowing me to serve my calling to: Grow in Wisdom, Learn to Love Better, Steward Social Justice, and Practice Radical Servanthood.

I continue my role in chaplaincy while leading new education and research endeavors with the Palliative Medicine Consult service at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center (ABSMC). This includes developing programs to increase research literacy for chaplain staff and students and designing educational activities to keep the ABSMC community up to date with trends in Palliative and End-of-Life care. 

My research interests include: identifying unique spiritual care needs across the various trajectories of functional decline that precede death; and the phenomenology of spirituality among patients suffering from dementia. I am also interested in using Action Research Methods that are intrinsic to clinical pastoral education processes and bedside chaplaincy work to explore spiritual care at the end of life. (For more information on Action Research in Chaplaincy, see my article for the National Association for Catholic Chaplains at https://www.nacc.org/vision/2013-mar-apr/collaborative-inquiry-an-accessible-relevant-approach-to-chaplaincy-research-by-lavera-crawley/). Please contact me if you are interested in potential collaborations.