YunYun Lu is a dual-certifiedFNP and PMHNP, currently working as a PMHNP atWashington Corrections Center For Women. Her daily panel includes initial psychiatric assessments for the new inmates, consultations with primary care providers, and medication adjustment appointments. Most of her patients have dual diagnoses with a history of substance use and major mental illnesses, which are common reasons for them to be incarcerated. She also has perinatal patients who came in with pregnancy status, and after their babies were born, some of them get to keep the baby in our mother-baby unit and raise them. In addition, she is proud that to provide gender-affirming mental health treatment for over 100 transgender patients in WCCW as well. The opportunity to work with those complex, treatment-resistant patientschallenges her skills and knowledge every day, but it is also very satisfying whenthey have an improvement in symptom relief and function better in their lives, work, and academics.

Jessica Gonzales is a PMHNP currently working in a private practice setting, in a telehealth setting since the beginning of the pandemic, mostly doing medication management, and diagnosing.

Chipepo Mugala is a graduate of UW Medex Physician Assistant Program 2015. She has spent the last 7 years splitting her time between her two passions, acute care medicine in Urgent Care Settings and Behavioral Medicine. Since 2017, Chipepo has been serving as a psychiatric prescriber in SOUND’s Community Network Program (CNP) serving individuals with Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities (ID and DD) living in King County. SOUND is a nonprofit community mental health provider serving individuals with mental and substance use disorders. She was recruited to SOUND’s CNP program by her mentor, Dale Sanderson PA-C recently retired psychiatric prescriber from CNP program, whom she met when she was a medical case manager working with ID clients supported by Alpha Supported living Services, a community based supported living agency for IDD clients.

Suzanne Dalgarn, ARNP, is a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner working in an outpatient clinic in Everett WA for the last 11 years. Her focus is the adult population with a special interest in ADHD, mood disorders and anxiety. She primarily meets with clients via telehealth, a mix of new and established patients for medication management and brief supportive therapy. She is also a professor of nursing at a local community college since 2000. Her focus at the college is mental health nursing. She has enjoyed mentoring future nurses into the role, helping them build empathy and understanding of clients struggling with mental health issues.

She is looking forward to the fellowship and the opportunities to gain better understanding of and skill in integrated care. She believes the community need is great for improved access and integration of care to help address the mental health challenges that impact global quality of life of all ages. She continues to envision that mental health and holistic wellbeing will and should be an ongoing focus of importance.

She sees this fellowship as an opportunity to build skills and strategies to improve access to care, continuity of care, and quality of care to the community at large.

In the next 5 years, she believes the emphasis on holistic care will continue to grow, as health providers build bridges together and with communities towards meeting best outcomes, providing clients with all the benefits of a holistic focus on mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing. 

Sasha Ericksen, MD, is a psychiatrist at MultiCare Behavioral Health in Tacoma, Washington, and Clinical Faculty at Tacoma Family Medicine Residency program and East Pierce Addiction Medicine Fellowship program. She has an outpatient psychiatry practice, and teaches psychiatry and provides supervision to trainees. She has been co-located with primary care for 4 years. She has previously worked in tribal health, private practice, and group practice.   

Dr. Ericksen became interested in Collaborative Care due to the pressures of working in mental health in a rural community, and the promise of collaborating across health disciplines. She recently received a grant to start a pilot collaborative care program at the residency, focusing on an urban underserved community with high rates of addiction. She hopes that the fellowship program will help her optimize this program and make it a successful example for integration in a wider system. 

In the future, Dr. Ericksen hopes that integrated care will become more common, more acceptable and more useful for patients and providers. Expanding access and improving satisfaction rates for patients and providers is a worthy goal. She also hopes that integrated health systems can break through long held barriers preventing mental health and medical health providers from working together for overall wellness.   

Sara Weelborg, ARNP is an adult psychiatric nurse practitioner in private practice in University Place. She also contracts with the Squaxin Island Health Clinic to provide psychiatric medication management via telemedicine and onsite medication management for the Northwest Indian Treatment Center. She is currently completing her Doctor of Nursing Practice degree at Boise State University; she received her master’s degree at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and her post-master’s certificate at Rush University. She is a US Navy Nurse Corps retiree and has worked as a psychiatric nurse practitioner for 17 years in various settings.

Believing that patients can be well-served by receiving their mental health care within their familiar primary care practice setting, she is interested in incorporating the Collaborative Care Model into her current practice. She feels strongly that integrated care can help reduce stigma and improve access to timely mental health intervention. She hopes that participation in the fellowship will help her incorporate the Collaborative Care Model into her current practice so she can help improve access to care in her community and partner with primary care staff to share knowledge and experience to support their delivery of mental health services.

She hopes that five years from now, Collaborative Care/integrated care will be a common care delivery model in primary care practices rather than a novel idea.

Jocelyn Engler, PharmD, PA-C is a psychiatric PA-C with an extensive background in pharmacotherapeutics. She graduated from the UW School of Pharmacy and MEDEX in 2016. She has been working as a pharmacist in compounding pharmacy since 2017. In addition to compounding, Dr. Engler has been working in community psychiatry for 4 years. She worked for a community-based private practice in Issaquah, WA, Family Psychiatry, treating school-aged and adolescent children, as well as adults. Since 2021, she works for Sound Health as a psychiatric PA-C treating children and adults with Intellectual and Development Disabilities (IDD). Sound Health is a nonprofit organization providing effective and innovative healthcare for the underserved in the community. Sound Health incorporates counseling, addiction treatment, mental health services for children, family oriented services, psychiatric services, and primary care.

Many of the individuals Dr. Engler treats are minimally verbal or non-verbal with a limited internal state; therefore, it is especially important to coordinate care with other medical specialties for an individual who is deviating from their baseline. Through participation in this program, she hopes to gain a better understanding of how to incorporate effective procedures to improve coordinated care amongst different specialties and Sound Health. She is hopeful streamlined coordination amongst medical specialties will improve patient outcomes. In five years, she hopes Collaborative Care/integrated care will be a standard of practice with all medical institutions including large healthcare systems, private practices, and nonprofit community-based clinics.

Anne Chapin, PA works with PeaceHealth primary care clinics in Bellingham, Burlington, and Sedro Woolley as a consultant for the Integrated Behavioral Health program. Through participating in this program, she hopes to increase her skills and knowledge in delivering this model of care to be as effective as possible in her role. Her hope is that this model can expand access to behavioral health services to all primary care clinics at some point.

Joseph Tomsic, ARNP is a Board Certified Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner and Nurse Executive Advanced working in the south Puget Sound area. He has advanced degrees in Nursing from the University of Washington and Health Policy & Administration from Washington State University. He is a retried United States Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and Chief Nurse.

His initial mental health experience was in 1995 as a United States Navy Nurse Corps Officer (BSN, RN) and certified psychiatric nurse working on an inpatient mental health unit. Since then, his professional experience includes caring for military and civilian psychiatric patients in inpatient and outpatient settings. He transitioned from nursing leadership to the psychiatric nurse practitioner role in 2012. He works for the MultiCare Behavioral Health Network as an Outpatient Medical Director.

He enjoys living in the Pacific Northwest and just about any outdoor activity. He was born in Chicago but has lived in Washington State since 1976. He considers the Sumner/Puyallup Valley home. He is married and has three adult children.

Through participation in the fellowship program he hopes to gain advanced knowledge of integrated care to help expand access for community members to specialty psychiatric consultation. He would like to help the care team treat members of the community with mental health conditions within the primary care setting. He believes early intervention in primary care could help patients achieve and maintain recovery without the need for scarce community mental health psychiatric specialty care resources. He hopes that early access to specialty psychiatric consultation will help the care team avoid and/or better identify acute risk situations to reverse the multiyear trend of increasing suicide rates.

Mabel Bongmba, MD is the inaugural Associate Medical Director of Collaborative Care for Kaiser Permanente Washington. Dr. Bongmba’s interest in this care model stems from her experiences in public mental health as a medical trainee; the necessity of this work has been reinforced by the crippling shortage of mental health professionals in Washington and throughout our country. In five years, she hopes that her participation in the fellowship program will support the implementation of a high quality Collaborative Care program that will herald the successful expansion of this model of care across dozens of clinics. This will help improve access to specialty mental health services for the severely mentally ill. Dr. Bongmba has served as a psychiatric consultant and diversity, equity, and inclusion advisor. She has continuously provided direct care to adult patients at mental health specialty clinics over the past decade.