Jennifer Purses, DO, is board certified in general psychiatry and child and adolescent psychiatry. She has been providing direct psychiatric consultative coverage in the acute care setting at Mary Bridge Children’s (a regional tertiary care children’s hospital) since August 2013 and has served as the Medical Director of Consultation & Liaison Psychiatry there since April 2016. More recently, her role is evolving to better strengthen outpatient primary care settings through providing support to co-located psychiatric nurse practitioners and through exploring novel models of care delivery to better address challenges of access to mental health services for pediatric primary care populations.
Dr. Purses has become very interested in the Collaborative Care Model and how this model may be adapted for children, adolescents, and families. She hopes that participating in this fellowship program will provide the skills and knowledge to establish a concrete plan moving toward better integration in pediatric primary care settings in the Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital & Health Network and across the Pacific Northwest. Learning what is needed to implement an integrated care model into our primary care settings is imperative to overcome barriers to care, particularly access. Educating and empowering primary care settings to care for basic mental health needs of children and families provides the opportunity to unburden specialty providers, allowing them to focus on higher acuity, more severe mental health needs, resulting in improved access to services for everyone.
Dr. Purses hopes that 5 years from now, Mary Bridge will have implemented a robust and successful Collaborative Care Model that allows families to receive care for basic mental health services in settings with which they are familiar and comfortable, thereby reducing barriers to care. She hopes that the roll-out of this novel model of care delivery will result in more children receiving the care they need, pediatricians feeling better equipped and increasingly competent at caring for the whole patient, and better integration of patient & family-centered care within primary (and perhaps even specialty) care