David Paris, PMHNP-BC received his nurse practitioner degree from the University of Washington. He has worked in inpatient and outpatient psychiatry settings for more than 20 years, and currently works as a Psychiatric Nurse Practitioner for a private nonprofit clinic in Cowlitz County.

Mr. Paris also currently provides telepsychiatry services for crisis patients in Grays Harbor County. His employer is rapidly expanding into other services not robustly available in rural counties, including primary care and substance use disorder treatment. The integration of these services with ongoing mental health services is a primary focus of effort. He has extensive experience implementing and providing remote psychiatry services, including in austere locations. His current interest is the comprehensive management of patients with severe and chronic mental illness.

Renn Polk, ARNP received MSNs from the University of Southern Maine and Norwich University. She completed her psychiatric nurse practitioner residency at the joint Duke University and Durham VA Medical Center program. She is currently in the Doctoral completion program at Gonzaga University. In addition to her academic experience, Ms. Polk is a U.S. Army Veteran and current Army Reservist who will assume command of the 1972nd Combat Operational Stress Control Unit in June 2018.

Ms. Polk chose to pursue the Community-Based Integrated Care Fellowship as she has experienced how the false distinction between medical and mental health care can encumber patient care. She believes that integrated and patient-centered approaches are requisite elements of good health care. As part of her fellowship experience, she hopes to improve her own practice of integrated care and take an active role continuing the adoption of successful integrated care models in the Army and VA health care systems.

Ms. Polk’s clinical interests include moral injury, trauma, and stressor related disorders, and adjustment disorders related to military service and transitions. Her research interests include the identification and treatment of moral injury. She is currently proposing research investigating the intersection of trauma experiences, moral injury, and psychophysiological reactivity.

Howard Welsh, ARNP resides in Forks, WA where he does primary care for local residents, many of whom are loggers, truckers, and fishermen or longtime members of the local tribes engaged in subsistence activities. There is a sizable community of locals working in the forests gathering salal, mushrooms, and recycling cedar for roofing shakes.

There is one grocery store and two hardware stores. There is a Head Start and an elementary and secondary school system. Along Highway 101 there are some restaurants and motels with service workers, cooks, and waitresses. There are a few state and federal employees as well. This makes for a diverse population of patients. 

There are serious alcohol and polysubstance problems and seemingly intractable poverty-driven health problems with every kind of social and mental health problem imaginable. Residents watch the logs being loaded onto trucks and driven to the ports in Port Angeles and Aberdeen-Hoquiam and loaded onto ships headed overseas, where they are milled and processed – work the local residents used to do for decent wages.

In a community like this, Mr. Welsh is expected to do everything, so integration of healthcare is a necessity. According to Mr. Welsh, “The local people just don’t get any mental health care, or any care at all, without the integration of the clinic services wth the local agencies which are bare bones. It is good that an old curmudgeon such as myself is here trying to provide some patient advocacy where it is otherwise lacking.”

Since Mr. Welsh enjoys being a nurse, as well as fishing/ hunting/hiking, he will continue working here until something “forces him into retirement.”

Mr. Welsh appreciates the UW for helping him be a better provider and actually giving him the instruction he needs to keep working effectively in this environment.

Ginny Buccola-Tourney, DNP, ARNP works as a PMHNP, both in a small private practice and in community mental health, both in Pierce County. At the community mental health center where she spends most of her time, she serves as the manager of medical services, providing supervision and administrative support to a team of 5 providers as well as providing direct care to clients. She provides medication management for children, adolescents and adults with a specialty focus in perinatal mental health. She also enjoys providing reflective supervision in infant mental health for our local Nurse Family Partnership nurses and teaching both about perinatal mental health and infant mental health.

Ms. Buccola-Tourney is very interested in a model of care that supports psychiatric specialists serving as consultants to primary care providers. She would like to develop a sustainable model for her clinic to provide consultation to their area primary care providers. She is also hoping to build relationships and learn from other providers throughout the state.

Her clinic has struggled to recruit and retain psychiatric providers, and this will be even more pressing over the next few years as the majority of their provider team is close to retirement. Simultaneously there is a great push to transition more stable clients out of her clinic and back to their primary care providers. This type of transfer is not always successful as there is no current structure for them to provide ongoing consultation or relationship building with our informal community partners. With active collaboration we would be able to expand access for clients to have their psychiatric medications safely and effectively managed.

Ms. Buccola-Tourney has many hopes! She hopes that they have an effective consultation system in place for psychiatric specialists to provide consultation with primary care providers. She hopes that EMR systems are in place to facilitate provider to provider communication. She hopes that psychiatric care is more easily accessible to those who are in need and that they can receive the best quality care quickly and efficiently.

Susan Marney, ARNP has been a psychiatric nurse practitioner for over 20 years and currently practices at Catholic Charities in Wenatchee, Washington where she works primarily with children and adolescents. Catholic Charities is in the process of integrating with medicine and she is the first practitioner to spend part of each week in a pediatric setting partnering with Columbia Valley Community Health to help provide integrated care.

Ms. Marney was previously the director of the Behavioral Health Department at Confluence Health and worked closely with administration and medical practitioners to move from a co-location model to an integrated one. She has a strong interest in finding ways to integrate services from a patient-centered perspective where relationships with patients are made stronger. She and her colleagues are at the forefront of designing a medical home for the chronically mentally ill and children who are in fragile circumstances and require intensive outpatient care.

Ms. Marney hopes that five years from now, the barriers between agencies in her community will be gone and patients will be able to easily and effectively get their medical and mental health needs met by practitioners who are skilled and well-connected to their patients and to each other.