Message from the Associate Dean
The Office of Clinical Affairs creates mechanisms to support faculty who maintain a clinical practice in addition to their teaching and scholarship activities. It facilitates synergy among faculty's practice, teaching, and scholarship, provides leadership in designing innovative approaches to delivering quality health care to individuals and families, facilitates the conversion of clinical and health services knowledge into policy, and administers the YSN Faculty Practice Group.
YSN has long been known for its clinical expertise and emphasis on providing direct health care services to the community.
Over half of the faculty maintain a clinical practice and spend a considerable amount of their time in clinical settings.
Such a high number of the faculty who provide direct patient care is not the norm among nursing education institutions, especially those institutions that have developed as extensive and productive a research base as Yale.
For the past 80 years, YSN has had a tremendous impact on the health of individuals and families in our local community.
YSN faculty has spearheaded the development of new strategies to minimize the effects of diabetes and the HIV/AIDS epidemic.
They have created new models to care for the chronically ill; put in place new technology to bring cardiac care into the home setting; and developed new programs to reduce disparities in health.
And, they have responded to the health care needs of women by establishing a Women's Health and Midwifery practice.
This practice provides comprehensive health services for women in Greater New Haven.
These and other groundbreaking initiatives continue to meet the emerging needs of patients, demonstrate better ways to deliver care, provide cutting-edge learning opportunities for students, allow for continuous generation of new knowledge and provide real data to inform policy development.
By supporting the YSN faculty to provide direct patient care, the Office of Clinical Affairs is furthering the YSN mission to improve health care for all people.
Martha Swartz
Associate Dean for Clinical and Community Affairs
|
Clinical Links
Faculty Spotlight
Vanya Hamrin treats the whole child through her work over the past 15 years as a child and adolescent clinical nurse specialist. She currently holds a joint appointment from YSN at West Haven Mental Health Center where she provides individual, family and group therapies as well as psychopharmacological management to children and adolescents.
"We see the full spectrum of psychiatric disorders - childhood depression, AD-HD, learning disabilities, behavioral disorders, childhood schizophrenia and anxiety disorders. Once we diagnose the child, we provide comprehensive psychiatric treatment and work with the parents and the child's school system. We then advocate for the child's learning and emotional needs within the school system," Vanya explains.
Because the Mental Health Center is funded through DCF, clients are not limited to a certain number of mental health visits and therefore have comprehensive options for longer term access to clinicians. "Our nurse practitioners and other mental health professionals can visit the school to check in on a child she is working with. As a result of our close working relationship with the West Haven Public School District, we are available for the child throughout his childhood, as he moves from elementary to middle school to high school," explains Vanya.
"We are bridging a gap to help children -- to provide them with comprehensive evaluation, diagnostic and treatment plan -- to offer full support. Because I can prescribe medications that might be needed, this can help minimize the shuffle that families may otherwise have to go through to receive mental health services."
She can also see the family members of the child to help address issues that the whole family may be experiencing, such as parenting concerns or relationship problems. As part of her work with the Mental Health Center, Vanya has developed an anger management group for adolescents as well as coordinating several parenting groups. Services such as anger management can impact a whole family to make positive home life changes. These in turn result in better outcomes for the child's education and his functioning with peers at school, as well.
While seeing patients and also teaching at YSN, Vanya has also found time to do scholarly research and publish articles contributing to greater insight into pediatric psychiatric disorders. "In my scholarship I have focused on treatment for childhood depression. I find it directly correlates with my work in West Haven because I see a lot of children who are depressed and can follow them through evidence-based therapies to secure long-term positive outcomes."
Vanya's work with students at YSN allows her to shape the experiences of future clinicians and help expose them to clinical situations that cover the full range of adolescent and family psychiatric treatment. To learn more about Vanya Hamrin and her work, click here.
|
|
|
|
