Yuma practitioner named NIH assistant director
Dr. Tanya sorrell continues to practice virtually here
When Tanya Sorrell took a job at the Excel Group in Yuma after graduating first in her class from Vanderbilt University School of Nursing in 2003, little did she know how much Yuma would still be a part of her life after more than 15 years.
She’s had her practice here in Yuma all these years, and now she’s been named as the assistant director of the National Institutes of Health’s clinical research team for the rural and urban underserved Great Lakes region and will be starting clinical service programs throughout the Midwest and New Mexico.
However, Sorrell plans to continue her Yuma practice. “I’m still here also in Yuma seeing patients, having converted my practice to tele-psych during COVID-19 and will be expanding our programs even though I’ll also be working for NIH,” she said.
“So Yuma will continue to receive our mental health services, as well as be privy to the latest treatment recommendations from NIH to help our region, which will have lasting mental health issues related to this COVID-19 outbreak,” she added.
Sorrel came to Yuma on a student loan repayment program through the National Health Service Corps, but she stayed because of the friendly residents and work for which she has such passion.
“Everyone was so kind and welcoming. There are friends I call ‘mami and papi.’ They’re more like family. They helped me improve my Spanish and learn about the area, while loving the food,” Sorrell said.
A bark scorpion sting in 2009 motivated her to start her own private psychiatric practice, which she named Yuma Mental Health and Wellness Center.
As told in a 2009 story in the Yuma Sun, Sorrell stepped on a bark scorpion, one of the most venomous scorpions found in the Sonoran Desert. Within 10 minutes, Sorrel had difficulty breathing. “I almost died,” Sorrel said.
That experience led her to reevaluate her life and she decided she wanted to have more control in how she saw and treated patients.
Her practice continued to grow, but she also worked with other agencies in Yuma providing psychiatric care in English and Spanish. She had noticed disparities in the Latino population in Yuma that formed the basis for her doctorate degree in psychiatric nursing from the University of Arizona in Tucson.
Noticing that many of her clients sought botanical herbs and other treatments as well as spiritually related treatments, such as “curanderismo,” as part of their mental health care, she based her research on Latino mental health treatment preferences.
She found that 80% of the Latinos in her study reported using herbs to treat mental health, like “tila de flor,” or passiflora, for anxiety, and 25% used some type of traditional spiritual activities to help with their mental health, including curanderismo (folk traditional healing), herbaria” (herbal) and other practices published in nursing and Latino health journals since then.
Incorporating culturally related care into traditional western mental health practices then became the main clinical research area for her.
Sorrell graduated in 2013 with a doctorate in psychiatric nursing in rural and border health with a minor in complementary and alternative health, with hopes of starting a research program with Latinos along the U.S.-Mexico border.
Then she was offered a clinical research position as a professor at the University of Colorado-Anschutz Denver in 2014. She moved to Denver, Colorado, but continued to fly back to Yuma for one week each month to see her patients here.
It wasn’t until January 2017, when her flight was canceled because of a snowstorm in Denver, that clients realized that she was no longer a full-time Yuma resident. She continued to see her patients by telemedicine and in person throughout this time, while also providing therapy sessions by telemedicine with students at the University of Colorado-Anschutz Medical Campus in Denver, Colorado.
She developed a training rotation for psychiatric nurse practitioner students and residents in rural telepsych medicine, and she and her students have seen dozens of clients for free through this program, as therapy services are sometimes prohibitive for community members without private insurance.
“The students loved learning about Yuma, the lettuce season, winter visitors, the cross border medical systems and how to address the special concerns of rural border residents,” Sorrell said. “The clients loved being able to give pointers to the students, to learn coping skills in addressing their issues, and to know they were helping and training them in feedback to become better psychiatric providers.”
During her tenure at the University of Colorado, Sorrell worked specifically with mental health and substance use issues for rural and urban underserved Latinos in Colorado. With grant funding, she started a Latino mental health community-based group called “MANOS: Hands for Mental Health,” to discuss mental health issues and the best ways to address them with help from Latino communities.
Meetings in person and online continued as Sorrell developed clinical research questions for potential research funding from discussions with that community group.
The first large study was a $1 million legislative program to address the opioid crisis in Colorado. The pilot study funded medication-assisted treatment agencies in rural Colorado with a view to developing evidence-based practices to encourage treatment services for opioid use. Those programs funded treatment for more than 1,000 patients in the first two years.
Sorrell also worked with local mental health providers in Yuma to develop assistance in programs for medication-assisted treatment as well as provide services for clients in her Yuma practice.
After testifying at the Colorado Legislature and meeting with congressional representatives in Washington, D.C., she served as the lead researcher on a $5 million expanded medication-assisted treatment project for starting programs for opioid use disorder in 17 counties in Colorado.
So far, 40 agencies are receiving clinical training in medication-assisted treatment and best practices in therapies, medications and social services to help clients combat opioid use. A report on the work done on the program was submitted in June by virtual testimony to the Colorado Legislature.
With COVID-19, Sorrell’s group also worked to train and assist providers in telemedicine services and the changing regulations, personal protective equipment acquisition (masks, face shields, gloves), and how to overcome barriers for clients to get help and providers to cope with all the changes. She noted that early research shows an increase in opioid overdoses nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Her work in developing specialty clinical research programs based on the community-based participation model attracted the attention of the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Drug Abuse.
With the opening of a new clinical research center for the Midwest region consisting of seven medical and nursing school collaboratives in several states and housed at Rush University School of Medicine, Sorrell began work as the assistant director of that regional research center this month.
Based in Chicago, Illinois, Sorrell plans to use the same community-based methods to develop groups to encourage minority participation in clinical research to address mental health and substance use issues in the Midwest. Her team has already started projects to address culturally adapted, evidence-based treatment programs for mental health and substance use issues for Native Americans, training programs in medication-assisted treatment for rural Illinois and other states, and she’ll continue her work with Latino urban-underserved groups and opioid use disorders.
In March, with the COVID-19 pandemic, Sorrell converted her Yuma psychiatric practice services to all tele-psychiatric services for the time being, and hopes to redevelop her tele-therapy clinical rotations with psychiatric nurse practitioner students at Rush University in the near future.
She’s been interviewed in Arizona and Colorado on television, NPR, and newspapers for expert information on coping with mental health issues and substance use prevention and minority disparities during COVID-19.
She also plans to continue to work with mental health colleagues in Yuma to incorporate the state-of-theart clinical services she’s learning in other areas from around the U.S. in her clinical practice in Yuma.
She looks forward to the day that safer travels will allow her to see her clients here in person and to visit the area she still calls home, she said.