The recently renamed “Minnesota Mental Health Community Foundation” has been in development since 2006. MPS members saw the need to support outreach activities with a permanent structure, so they worked with leadership and staff to form the Minnesota Psychiatric Information and Outreach Foundation in 2010. Since its inception, the foundation has strived to offer a community-wide infrastructure to support collaboration and innovation with projects that bring together disciplines, approaches and volunteers working together to impact mental health care in Minnesota. The original board included representation from psychiatry, nursing, social work and community volunteers. Today the foundation and its board offer leadership and support for the whole mental health community and we are actively working to expand the board to represent a cross-section of Minnesota’s mental health community.
The Mission of the Minnesota Mental Health Community Foundation is to support and promote access outreach and education about Mental Health treatment and systems of care. 
|
Vanessa Stumpf, MD, Awarded 2018 Bob Baumer Scholarship
   Growing up and attending medical school in North Dakota, Vanessa Stumpf, MD, primarily worked with community hospitals and clinics for her medical needs as well as helping to serve the community. Particularly when she rotated for two months at a rural family medicine site (population around 3,000), she was struck by how well the physicians she worked with knew their patients and their community. Every medical decision they made was truly based on what was going to best serve the patient, and whether the patient could actually adhere to that plan. This is the type of physician Dr. Stumpf strives to be, meeting her patients where they are to serve them well. She planned to use this scholarship to attend the Mental Health Services Conference and learn unique ways to improve her patient care. She is passionate about attending conferences and education and has found in her own personal experience attending the national APA conference as well as a local internal medicine conference in ND that they are one of the best and most effective ways to get the latest medical information. She also sees this as the perfect opportunity for her to network with other psychiatrists who are interested in community psychiatry and talk to them about challenges they face and how to develop as a resident to be prepared for these challenges. She loves to talk and learn with her co-residents and will not only apply what she learned to her own patients but will share that knowledge with co-residents too.
Dr. Stumpf attended the 2018 IPS (Institute on Psychiatric Services) in Chicago, IL, and participated in APA Leadership Fellowship activities. She summarizes her thoughts here: In September I had the joy of opening my email one evening and finding out that I was the recipient of the Bob Baumer Scholarship to use to attend IPS: The Mental Health Services Conference in Chicago. Attending the conference has been one of the highlights so far during my intern year at HCMC and Regions, and I wouldn’t have had this opportunity without the generous scholarship. I can honestly say that there weren’t any sessions at the conference that I didn’t enjoy attending or find relevant to my practice as an intern at community hospitals. The sessions I attended varied from topics such as access to care for homeless clients, mental healthcare for LGBTQ and transgender individuals, to gun violence and advocating for our patients with psychiatric illness. I enjoyed the opportunity to network with other residents and psychiatrists from all over, including Sweden and Canada. During one of the sessions that I attended on preventing physician burn-out, we did a group brainstorming activity, and my group had members practicing in all sorts of different areas of psychiatry and at different points in their careers, from interns to physicians nearing retirement. I was particularly struck by how passionate all the individuals in my group were about psychiatry, and how despite the challenges in our careers everyone in the group was really devoted to finding creative ways to help our patients. I kept thinking to myself during the conference how lucky I am that I chose a career where I’m surrounded by such amazing people, not only in my own residency program, but around the world! Getting this scholarship introduced me to a conference and community of people that I will continue to learn from, interact with, and will help grow my career as a psychiatrist. Alex Hartley, MD, Is the 2018 Eric Brown Residents Caucus Scholarship Winner
Alex Hartley, MD is currently a PGY4 psychiatry resident at the University of Minnesota. She has been working in the mental health field since 2004 and was driven to pursue a career in psychiatry as an avenue to have a greater impact and louder voice to advocate on behalf of the population she had been working with. Currently, there is no formal training or didactics in her program that focuses on advocacy work. In her fourth year, she has chosen to dedicate a half day per week of elective time to work on advocacy and leadership goals as a member of the advocacy, outreach and engagement committee. Through both of these opportunities she is working to develop a curriculum for physician advocacy to help guide medical students, residents and attending physicians to increase engagement in health policy and advocacy.
Dr. Hartley will summarize her experiences in May 2019. Watch here for her report. |
