Hello my name is JoEllen Key I have been a nurse for almost four years. I worked inpatient stroke and medicine unit for a year and have been working at the VA as an outpatient behavioral health nurse for almost the past 3 years. I love what I do and serving the population that we work with. We are not doing face to face visits right now and I really miss seeing our patients. I have a wonderful boyfriend and two amazing kiddos that keep us very busy. In addition to the kids we also have two fur babies.

I feel like in my current role we use evidenced based practice a lot to guide our patient care. We frequently read and utilize different techniques to get patients whose mental health is suffering to encourage them to seek services and to stay engaged in those services. We look at the statistics of suicide rates or attempts and different research on how to lower those numbers. We also stay up to date on the current research de-escalation techniques as they are something we use frequently for our and our patients safety.