2013 Outstanding Clinicians Awards

This is Addiction Professional’s fifth annual effort to honor clinical professionals who overcome professional (and often personal) challenges to offer exemplary service. Colleagues nominate individuals for the Outstanding Clinicians Awards, and our annual review of the candidates always demonstrates to us the professional dedication that keeps this field vibrant.

We are particularly pleased this year to have added a nursing category to our customary categories of counselor, clinical supervisor/manager, and physician. Margaret Shapiro is our initial nurse recipient; enjoy the profiles of her and counselor Janice Sealey, clinical manager Sher Peck, and physician Kim Dennis, MD. We will formally honor the winners in September at the National Conference on Addiction Disorders (NCAD) in Anaheim, Calif.

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Janice Sealey

Position: Clinical counselor

Organization: Clay Behavioral Health Center, Middleburg, Fla.

Quote: “When I’m sent a client, I like to be blindsided. I want to give them a chance. At some point, the system may have failed them.”

Comment from a colleague: “This nominee has sacrificed self, time and possessions when the individual is giving 100 percent toward recovery,” writes Valynda Rowser, correctional probation officer for the Florida Department of Corrections.

A service system that deals with an offender population will by definition involve a great deal of structure and control. But it is clear that Florida correctional officials place a great deal of trust in the judgment of counselor Janice Sealey, who has been with Clay Behavioral Health Center for nine years and works with felony offenders in the justice system.

“Everyone who I’ve constantly worked with, they respect what I say,” says Sealey, who received much of her mentoring at Talbert House’s residential program in Ohio. “They let me make the final call.”

And as is evidenced from the comments of the Florida Department of Corrections probation officer who nominated Sealey for the counselor award, sometimes she is even consulted about clients who aren’t on her direct caseload.

“She is our diamond in the rough when attempting to develop personal goals for the clients,” writes correctional probation officer Valynda Rowser.

Sealey regularly works up to 14-hour days on a four-day-per-week schedule, and says she hasn’t missed a workday in nine years with the agency. Her clients generally have access to about eight weeks of outpatient treatment from the agency, and she emphasizes maximizing that opportunity but not being overly prescriptive at the same time.

“I tell clients, ‘You are in charge of you,’” she says. “I’ll give you the rope, and you determine how tight you want to pull it.” Of course, this comes with the understanding that a recommendation of “violation of probation” status from Sealey likely will carry much weight with corrections officials.

Rowser remarks, “I have not had one offender complain about Ms. Sealey or make negative accusations in reference to her. Instead the clients have used words to describe her like fascinating, a good listener, approachable, kind, personable and thoughtful.”

Sealey describes her clinical approach as melding the best of the old and the new, as opposed to embracing only one orthodoxy. She knows she has sacrificed some things in her dedication to the work, but takes comfort in her understanding that “God is in control.”

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Sher Peck

Position: Vice president of satellite operations

Organization: Clarity Recovery & Wellness, Springfield, Mo.

Quote: “I encourage counselors to develop their own style; I allow them to run with it and make mistakes, so they can learn from it and grow. I like the sense of diversity among the members of the team.”

Comment from a colleague: Clarity president Merna Eppick says, “She is an enthusiastic trainer and mentor for interns, practicum students and counselor trainees and truly enjoys seeing the people she supervises and trains make progress in their profession.”

Sher Peck oversees two of the programs in an organization with multiple levels of residential and outpatient care for persons with substance use problems. She emphasizes counselor involvement in weekly brainstorming sessions that guide treatment planning, and she seeks to maximize each clinician’s individual strengths as opposed to taking a one-size-fits-all approach.

“One of the things I try to tap into is their own flair, their language,” says Peck, who turns 58 in August. “They then can see how they can use that to connect with clients. I don’t have a belief that clinicians have to say things this way or that way.”

Clarity president Merna Eppick offered a fascinating example of this approach in relating comments from one of the counselors under Peck’s supervision. The counselor had stated, “When I started I was full of self-doubt. I double questioned my every move and tried to ‘fit in the box’ of what I felt like substance abuse counseling should be. For some reason, that was quite OK to Sher. She was always there for me to listen to my questions, to weigh in on whatever it was that was pressing to me at the moment. Never did she squash the passion in this refining process that she led me through.”

With the agency having absorbed a 20% cut in government funding a couple of years ago, Peck has been heavily involved in developing the clinical focus of new specialized program initiatives at Clarity, including a re-entry program for offenders and a men’s treatment curriculum.

Through all of this she continues to emphasize the effort to maximize each clinician’s natural resources, so they can do a more effective job of helping clients in turn to maximize theirs.

She encourages counselors to become involved in the greater community, and she makes sure to keep a small caseload of her own clients despite her growing managerial responsibilities.

Peck has dealt with a visual limitation since age 8; she has no central vision as a result of a rare condition similar to macular degeneration. She says this has never really affected her clinical work. “I do have a trainer who works with the staff on how best to work with me,” she says. “I respond a lot better to verbal [cues] than visuals.”

In fact, she considers her condition to be something of a positive in terms of the work she does. “This gives me an increased awareness of the limitations others may have coming in,” she says.

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Margaret Shapiro

Position: Director of nursing

Organization: Gosnold on Cape Cod, Falmouth, Mass.

Quote: “When I worked at the hospital level, the nurses didn’t understand how to medicate for withdrawal protocols. I did a lot of on-the-spot teaching. Some of that came from modeling—I wasn’t afraid of the patients.”

Comment from a colleague: GosnoldCEO Raymond Tamasi writes of Shapiro, “Her most notable asset and significant contribution to our field is her ability to communicate and convince mainstream health providers and the community that addiction is a disease and afflicted patients deserve quality treatment and care.”

Margaret Shapiro has served two stints at Gosnold on Cape Cod, as a staff nurse from 1996-2002 and as director of nursing since last November. Those who praise her work at the addiction treatment facility might very well contend that what she accomplished between those two bookends might constitute her greatest contribution to the field.

As a clinical coordinator and nurse educator at the med/surg Falmouth Hospital, Shapiro drew from her resources in observing addiction’s impact on numerous medical illnesses, and in the process transformed staff attitudes and helped bring about major change for the better in patient outcomes.

“She literally took a staff that viewed addiction patients as worthless people to one that now treats them with respect, dignity, and an understanding of the illness they have,” says Gosnold CEO Raymond Tamasi.

Shapiro, 59, a nurse since the mid-1970s, traces her first exposure to addiction’s impact to her work running a gastroenterology office. At the general hospital, she encountered many nursing colleagues at first who did not want to be assigned to patients with substance use issues, adopting the “They did this to themselves” perspective.

She became a clinical coordinator early on in her tenure at the hospital, and would routinely be asked to see patients on units over which she had no direct authority. Tamasi would later express interest in conducting some addiction-related trainings at the hospital, and she was at the forefront of executing that. The two organizations have partnered in numerous respects since, and Shapiro has been able to participate from the vantage point of both facilities.

A better recognition of symptoms at the hospital level has led to fewer life-threatening withdrawal symptoms among hospitalized patients. Shapiro attributes this in part to the nursing staff having taken a less punitive-sounding approach to assessment, which tends to reveal more information.

“Sometimes what the person will tell you will depend on how you ask the questions,” she says.

Nurses from the hospital now spend two-day rotations at Gosnold, and realize that these patients are treated humanely and have the capacity to get well. “Some of the nurses have ended up following me here,” Shapiro says. In an organization taking advantage of the latest advances in medication-assisted therapy and other treatment, “They see that we’re so updated.”

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Kim Dennis, MD

Position: CEO and medical director

Organization: Timberline Knolls, Lemont, Ill.

Quote:“The epidemic we have with prescription drug abuse and dependence is at least in part the result of physicians prescribing these medications without doing substance abuse screenings. I am very disappointed in us as a profession for that.”

Comment from a colleague: “She believes in and maintains a holistic perspective in the practice of psychiatry, incorporating biological, psychosocial and spiritual approaches into the individually tailored treatment programs for each resident at Timberline Knolls,” writes the facility’s president and administrator, Tom Dattalo.

As Timberline Knolls president Tom Dattalo says about the women’s treatment facility’s CEO and medical director, “Dr. Dennis believes the lives of women and girls, and men, are in danger, and not speaking up is deadly.” And does the leader with the unusual dual role in her organization speak.

Kim Dennis, MD, in fact lists high among Timberline Knolls’ accomplishments its educational outreach to the field at large through its Clinical Development Institute, through which she and others on the team speak in many locations on addictions, eating disorders, trauma and related topics.

And Dennis has a personal perspective on these topics, having healed from an eating disorder, alcoholism and trauma experiences herself. “This has made me a much more compassionate clinician and a better clinician,” she says.

She generally does not offer specifics about her own recovery to clients (she maintains a caseload of 10 even in her added role as CEO), though she recently agreed to tell some of her story to residents during Eating Disorders Awareness Week.

“It wasn’t a simple decision,” she says. “In the past I would let people project their own notions about what I’m in recovery from.”

Timberline Knolls in recent years has acquired a national reputation for its work with complex clinical profiles. Dennis says that the women who receive treatment there generally have at least two primary Axis I diagnoses. In her roles in the organization, Dennis has helped to maintain the organization’s focus on leading-edge advances in both research and clinical practice.

Dennis emphasizes that she did not agree to become CEO until she was assured that she could maintain a role in group work with residents. “It’s unique to be able to be the CEO of an organization and have a handle on what’s happening with the clinical product,” she says. “Some CEOs don’t have that ‘weeds’ perspective.”

She sees as goals for the organization’s future a continued emphasis on cost-effective care and a move to align with the population-based perspective of care nationally. And she relishes continuing to explore the clinical complexities, “which I love.”