Claire Thurman-Moore, MSN, ARNP works as a PMHNP in Bellingham, WA. She is currently practicing at PeaceHealth St. Joseph Medical Center’s inpatient psychiatric unit. In the spring of 2020, she will be transitioning part-time to the integrated behavioral health program at PeaceHealth Medical Groups’ primary care clinic.
Like so many communities nationwide, Whatcom County does not have enough licensed psychiatric providers to meet the mental health needs of its community. Ms. Thurman-Moore has witnessed the impact of this shortage first hand. She frequently treats patients who have tried to seek timely psychiatric care in order to prevent hospitalization only to be turned away by psychiatrists or PMHNPs with full practices or months long waitlists. She also frequently refers psychiatrically complicated patients to their primary care providers for support after hospitalization, hoping that the PCP’s busy practices can adequately address these patients’ complex needs.
PeaceHealth’s integrated behavioral health program attempts to fill this gap by directly supporting primary care clinicians as they provide timely, high-quality mental health care. Ms. Thurman-Moore has come to believe that this program and others like it are the best way to leverage scarce psychiatric resources in order to more efficiently and creatively care for individuals with mental illness in our communities.
In participating in this fellowship, she hopes to solidify her skills as a psychiatric consultant as well as to identify and address specific needs within PeaceHealth’s existing integrated behavioral health program. In particular, she plans to work with her colleagues to develop a registry of patients with active mental illness to prevent folks from “falling through the cracks.” She hopes that, as PeaceHealth’s integrated behavioral health program grows, it can serve as a model for other primary care clinics in the county and that, within five years, integrated behavioral health will be standard practice throughout the healthcare system.