Senior Program Manager
Virginia Commonwealth University
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, Virginia, United States
Shirley Johnson BA,LSW
Sr. Program Manager
Division of General Medicine
Virginia Commonwealth University
Richmond, Virginia 23298
Ms. Johnson is a licensed social worker with over twenty-five years of experience in areas of mental health, child welfare, individuals with disabilities and fifteen years of experience in advocacy and care for patients with Sickle Cell Disease (SCD). She recently had the privilege of being asked to serve on National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine’s Committee(NASEM) on Sickle Cell Disease in Social Security Disability Evaluations.
Currently, she is the Senior Research Program Manager in charge of managing the Sickle Cell Patient-Centered Medical Home (SCDMH) where her focus is on improving care, quality of life and safety of patient care, while reducing utilization and cost to the healthcare system by using a team approach and Multidisciplinary Adult Care and Instrumental Support (MAIS) methods. She is responsible for the direct supervision of twelve staff and an overall program of twenty personnel. Many of her core responsibilities include oversight of all behavioral health personnel, program development, with expertise in transition of care and transformative therapies plus training over 500 people national on program development and oversight into SCD. She is the lead co-facilitator for the Sickle Cell Coordination of Achieving Patient Empowerment (SCCAPE) conference for the past six years, which is a four-day multi-disciplinary conference of lead national.
Although her recent career is in project management, training, and development, Ms. Johnson led the charge in a foundation-funded transition program at Virginia Commonwealth University (VCU) for patients with Sickle Cell Disease age 15 to 21, and was one of the lead developers in a national assessment tool for patients transitioning from pediatric to adult care, known as the TIP-RFT. She has been a co-author on several peer-reviewed publications with the most recent being in the Journal of Continuing Health Education Professionals titled” Development of a Framework to Describe Functions and Practice of Community Health Workers. She is a faculty member of the ASH Sickle Cell Disease (SCD) Centers Workshop, The Council for Change and The National Alliance of Sickle Cell Centers (NASCC), where she is the lead for the social worker committee