Welcome! My name is Caitlin Wise and I am the CEO and Chief Pharmacy Officer at East Nashville Wellness Center. This means I wear many hats at our small clinic. However, I have two primary jobs. One is to make sure the day to day operations of the clinic run smoothly. This can include anything from maintaining this website that you see here, as well as working on our strategic plan. My other main job is to care for patients. I have a collaborative practice agreement with Dr. Christman, which allows me to care for the patients coming to our clinic.
I cannot tell you how personally excited I am to be part of this organization. I have always been passionate about mental health. My own journey in the mental health field started when I was in college. During undergrad, I volunteered on a student-run crisis helpline. This experience taught me many valuable skills about helping those in crisis. One of the first questions we always asked when somebody called the crisis line, was what medications are you taking? The answer was typically some type of psychiatric medication. This got me interested in mental health medications, and lead me to go to pharmacy school.
After pharmacy school, I completed my residency with the Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services. In my role with this department, one of my jobs was to inspect substance use facilities. I realized that many facilities in Tennessee provide only substance use services, or only mental health services, not both. This didn’t make sense to me.
It seemed like there were so many people needing access to mental health and substance use services who just weren’t getting them. Or if they were getting them it was only one or the other, and not both. I wanted our clinic to be different.
Our clinic was founded on the idea that there wasn’t enough access to services in Nashville, and that coordination of care should be done under one roof. I have seen too many issues with pharmacies not talking to physicians offices, or mental health providers not talking to substance use providers. This ultimately harms the patient. We wanted to be integrated from day one. To provide both mental health and substance use services. We also wanted to make sure that pharmacy and medicine worked together, collaboratively. I am happy to say we have done both of these things.
We have already started seeing immense success with our collaborative model. Our patients are truly benefiting from having both mental health and substance use services together. We have truly made a difference in our community, and hope to keep growing our team and our impact. This journey has had many setbacks along the way. It has not been an easy process. But every time we get to help a patient it makes our work that much more rewarding. I truly love getting to work in my local community and give back to those in need. We just need to mobilize more resources so we can have an even larger impact.