Ginni Buccola-Tournay, ARNP

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

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.

Michele Rowsome, ARNP

Michele Rowsome, ARNP functions as a behavioral consultant within a community based outpatient VA primary care clinic in Mount Vernon. She has worked within the VA system for 13 years.

Because of her role as ‘prescriber’ on a Primary Care Mental Health Integration (PCMHI) team, Ms. Rowsome has a built-in and vested interest in integrated care. She hopes to gain clinical skills that will help improve patient outcomes, and knowledge about how to more fully integrate with and consult with primary care providers.

Ms. Rowsome hopes that her participation in this program improves access to and quality of integrated and collaborative care for the rural veterans that she serves.

In 5 years, Ms. Rowsome sees integrated care as busier and more consultative in nature, because there will be strong buy-in from primary care providers. She also views it as a very efficient and cost-effective way to provide mental health care to people who may not be willing or able to present to a specialty mental health clinic. She feels that telepsychiatry has the potential to be an excellent avenue for connecting with patients who live in a rural setting so that they have appropriate access to the care they need.