|
|
|
|
Clinical Faculty Members Strengthen Department
Our clinical faculty members – over 300 strong – are a tremendous asset to our department. These men and women volunteer many hours of their time to help us reach our teaching, clinical, and research goals. Whether it be teaching courses, providing clinical consultation, or advising and supervising medical students, psychology residents or psychiatry residents, our volunteer faculty members help us carry out our mission of improving the health of the public every day.
The benefits are bi-directional. Clinical faculty enjoy ongoing contact with trainees who challenge them to remember clinical fundamentals and to stay current with the research literature. Being connected with the UW also helps foster collaborations and partnerships, both for our clinical faculty and for our regular faculty. For John Wynn, Medical Director for PsychoOncology & Supportive Care Services at Swedish Cancer Institute, serving as clinical professor has afforded him the opportunity to “pay it forward.”
“From the first weeks of medical school through two residencies and my early faculty career, I benefited, over and over again, from the support, encouragement and commitment of volunteer faculty,” said Wynn. “My activities of the past 22 years as a clinical professor have offered me a crucial opportunity to pay it forward, an important token of my appreciation for their generosity and their wisdom.”
Seattle Neuropsychiatric Treatment Center (SeattleNTC) psychiatrists Ken Melman, Josh Bess, Suzanne Kerns and Tuesday Burns strongly value their affiliation with our Department. For them, teaching and supervising residents is a two-way street, allowing them to “give back” as well as receive the benefits of having rewarding and stimulating interactions with residents and the core UW teaching faculty. This year, SeattleNTC is offering a new elective in Brain Stimulation Psychiatry for PGY-4 Psychiatry Residents, and the SeattleNTC team is gratified to know they are sharing their clinical expertise with the next generation of psychiatrists.
We couldn’t do the work we do without the support, time, and commitment of our clinical faculty. Thank you for all that you do!
Attention Faculty Mentors!
If you are the department mentor or mentorship committee chair for one of our assistant professors in the research, faculty scientist, or clinician teacher pathway, please make sure you and your mentee know his/her mandatory promotion date. You can find out this information and when he/she should plan to start the promotion application process by contacting Jane Corkery-Hahn.
New Parking Garage Opens at VA Puget Sound Health Care Center
On April 1, the long awaited parking relief at VA Puget Sound finally came! The Seattle Division opened their beautiful, new parking garage to Veterans and visitors. The new construction, located near the Emergency Department at the VA, is available to accommodate department faculty and staff visiting the VA and should support improved convenience when collaborating with VA-based investigators and collaborators.
|
|
Kirsten Williams named Director of Idaho Track
 Congratulations to Kirsten Williams on being newly appointed as the Director of our Psychiatry Residency Program's Idaho Track! Dr. Williams has been a resident, Chief Resident, faculty member, and Associate Director in the Idaho Track, and has served as Interim Director of the track since October 1, 2015. She has an in-depth knowledge of the program as well as outstanding administrative, teaching and clinical skills and is the ideal person to provide strong leadership for the Idaho track going forward. We are very fortunate to have Kirsten in this role!
New Rotations for Residents!
We've added two new community rotations for third and fourth year residents to gain experience and knowledge in neurostimulation and eating disorder treatment.
The Seattle Neuropsychiatric Treatment Center (SeattleNTC) has created a rotation for residents to gain competency in electroconvulsive therapy and in transcranial magnetic stimulation. Supervised by clinical faculty members Kenneth Melman, Suzanne Kerns and Joshua Bess, residents will not only get hands on experience with ECT and TMS but also experiences with diagnostic assessment of Deep Brain and Vagal Nerve Stimulation. This is an excellent opportunity for our residents to perform outpatient brain stimulation consultation and develop treatment options with excellent guidance from the Seattle NTC team.
Residents have also started rotating at the Eating Recovery Center in Bellevue. The center has an adult residential program and partial hospitalization program giving the residents an opportunity for intensive training in eating disorders. This rotation is being supervised by former graduates Neeru Bakshi and Brian Smart and is a terrific new addition to our repertoire of excellent community rotations.
|
|
Clark Lab Stands for Science
 By invitation of the American Psychological Society (APA) and Stand for Science (part of the APA’s Science Directorate), Jeremy Clark and his postdoctoral fellow Abigail Schindler recently met with U.S. House of Representative Jim McDermott’s (WA-D) office. Drs. Clark and Schindler discussed the need to “Stand for Science” by actively advocating for policy decisions that advance and preserve the infrastructure of social, behavioral and psychological science including providing predictable and steady spending increases for scientific agencies, ending sequestration, and ensuring that the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act supports merit review and does not cut the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate.
Drs. Clark and Schindler also spoke about the mission of our department as well as the current and future work of the Clark Lab within the Neurosciences Division, including their recent work published in The Journal of Neuroscience. As described in the paper, the lab identified a selective disruption in dopamine network dynamics that may promote persistent and poor decision-making after chronic adolescent alcohol use, even after periods of prolonged abstinence. Perhaps most exciting, they also demonstrated a pharmacological reversal of the disruption in adulthood. Together, these results highlight a novel neural mechanism underlying heightened risk-taking behavior in alcohol-dependent individuals and provide a potential therapeutic target for further investigation.
New Study Evaluates Clinical Intervention for Suicidal Behavior
Individuals recently discharged from inpatient psychiatry are at a very high, short-term risk for suicide, with the risk of suicide up to 200 times higher for individuals recently discharged from hospitals versus the general population. The Aftercare Focus Study led by Kate Comtois is implementing and evaluating a novel clinical intervention for suicidal thoughts and behavior called the Collaborative Assessment and Management of Suicidality, or CAMS. Unlike DBT and CBT, CAMS neither requires lengthy training and supervision, nor a substantial change to the clinician’s existing treatment approach.
Pilot work by Comtois showed that CAMS was more effective than treatment as usual at reducing suicidal ideation and psychological distress as well as increasing hope and treatment satisfaction for patients discharged from inpatient psychiatry. The goal of the current study is to rigorously evaluate the effectiveness of CAMS for patients receiving treatment or evaluation in the emergency department or an inpatient unit as a direct result of a suicide attempt, or suicide attempt within the past month. The study is recruiting 200 adults from any of the four inpatient psychiatry units, two emergency departments, and two consultation-liaison psychiatry services at Harborview or UWMC. This easy-to-train, outpatient model of care has the promise to meaningfully engage suicidal patients, to systematically eliminate suicidal ideation and behaviors, and to reduce return to the ER and hospital units.
VA Study of Innovations in Suicide Prevention
Mark Reger is part of a team that received a grant from VA Health Services Research and Development (HSR&D) to study how predictive modeling may help target risk stratified suicide prevention interventions for Veterans. Dr. Reger will be leading the implementation of one of the suicide prevention interventions ("Caring Letters") with a team from Central Arkansas Veterans Healthcare System, VA Central Office, VA Rocky Mountain Mental Illness Research Education and Clinical Center (MIRECC), and VISN 4.
|
|
BHIP Wins Award of Excellence
The UW Neighborhood Clinics (UWNC) recently received a Washington Award of Excellence in Healthcare Quality from Qualis Health for their Behavioral Health Integration Program, or BHIP. BHIP is a team-based, collaborative care approach designed to improve the outcomes of anxiety and depression management in primary care. UW Medicine psychiatrists work as clinic-based psychiatric consultants who are responsible for supporting mental health care provided by primary care providers and care managers as well as providing direct patient consultations. The result is coordinated, effective, and convenient mental health care available in more than 15 UW clinics throughout the Puget Sound region. The model has resulted in significant improvement in the number of patients achieving care plan goals related to their anxiety or depression. More than 70% of patients with depression and 65% of patients with anxiety enrolled in BHIP have shown a 50% or greater improvement in symptoms following a minimum of 10 weeks of treatment.
UWNC was one of five healthcare organizations across the state of Washington recognized for their achievements in improving healthcare quality and outcomes including better healthcare for individuals, better health for populations, and reduced costs through improvement. Qualis Health, based in Seattle, is one of the nation's leading population health management organizations. Peter McGough, UWNC Medical Director, and Jay Wellington, UWNC Manager of Social Work, accepted the award.
Suicidal Ideation Standards Under Review
In February, The Joint Commission (TJC) distributed an alert calling for better assessment of suicidal ideation. The alert specifically targets primary care, emergency departments, and behavioral health settings, and emphasizes the importance of routine screening for suicidal ideation, safe environments during monitoring, and appropriate assessment and treatment for all patients with acute suicidal ideation. The Joint Commission highlights the importance of involvement of collateral contacts as appropriate and ongoing assessment and monitoring of suicidal thoughts after the initial assessment.
As part of the ongoing QI activity at Harborview over the past two years, we have reviewed current documentation standards regarding suicidal ideation and have revised our outpatient documentation templates to improve assessment in this area. We have plans to move these revisions into the inpatient discharge, psychiatric emergency services, and inpatient consultation liaison services after reviewing feedback of the early adopter outpatient faculty. UWMC and the VA are also reviewing care practices in light of TJC alert.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Dear friends and colleagues,
