Dianna Smith, MSN, PMHNP-B is a board-certified Psychiatric-Mental Health Nurse Practitioner with more than 10 years of professional nursing experience caring for psychiatric, mental health/behavioral, developmental/intellectual disability, and substance abuse clients in the community and acute settings. She loves providing direct care and values her expanded capacity to serve as a Provider.
Diana states she is honored and reverent that her practice role allows the responsibility of managing and facilitating care; “This has many meanings for me. Early in life, I learned service and the importance of offering others dignity with unconditional positive regard. I remember the basic meaning of nursing given years ago in my early nursing courses, “the treatment of human responses to illness using the nursing process,”. I have felt most fulfilled that providing mental healthcare, has frequently placed me in service of my patients beyond this limited definition”. Dianna’s passion is to assist those in her care to meet their personal best potential level of wellness, health, and functioning.
Dianna’s approach to practice is guided by the acknowledgment that, even at the individual level, we are addressing a need within a system, and so we have to consider and care for the whole system, or whole person. This includes implementing individualized interventions in a patient-centered manner. Patient-centered care involves learning and including the patient’s health beliefs, providing psycho-education, motivational interviewing, and encouraging autonomy with equal partnership in care planning and decision-making. After caring for the need and systems within a person, it is also important to consider the patient’s functioning within their family, daily living system, and surrounding environment, as those facets affect the station of a person. Dianna strongly believes that psychiatric care should be grounded in compassion, patient-centered, and facilitated by open, honest, and constructive communication. Dianna enjoys partnering with her clients and their families to arm them with the knowledge and tools to be autonomous captains of their own care. She provides active listening, thorough assessment and information gathering, diagnostics, evaluation, and medication management. She also encourages rest, nutrition, counseling, and supportive therapy.
