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.