Our Clinical Director

Judith Schwarz

Judith Schwarz, our Clinical Director, is a PhD prepared nurse, and one of the most experienced and highly respected end of life counselors in the country.

Having worked with us for the better part of 14 years, Judith has provided the bulk of our counseling services.

Judith Schwarz has been the Clinical Director of End of Life Choices New York and its predecessor organization Compassion & Choices of New York since 2002.  In that capacity she has counseled many hundreds of patients suffering from incurable and progressive or terminal illnesses and their families about end of life options and choices.

She earned a PhD in nursing at New York University where her research explored nurses’ experiences when asked by decisionally capable patients for assistance in dying. She completed a MSN at Lehman College, a certification program in bioethics and the medical humanities at Columbia University, and - many years ago, a nursing degree at a hospital program in Denver, Colorado.

Judith has taught ethics and health care law to nursing students, lectures frequently to professional nursing and palliative care audiences as well as to lay groups, and publishes regularly in professional journals. She has recently focused her writing and speaking on the option of voluntarily stopping eating and drinking as a means to achieve a peaceful, patient-controlled death, and has become concerned about the need to complete an advance directives by those newly diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease.