PhD – Nursing, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC
Nurse Practitioner – Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC

Biography: Patricia Soderlund, an Advanced Practice Registered Nurse and PhD, has focused her research on safe transitions and access to health care, including aims to reduce physical and mental health comorbidities for under-resourced populations.  

As an NCSP fellow, Dr. Soderlund partnered with Didi Hirsch Community Mental Health Center, and Drs. Erick Cheung, Ken Wells, and MarySue Heilemann (UCLA) on a community project titled “Evaluation of a Suicide Partnered Project.” Since 2013, UCLA critical care teams have partnered with Didi Hirsch (DH) community based crisis counselors to provide follow-up services for patients with suicide ideation and/or behaviors during the high-risk period following hospital discharge.  However, the program had never been evaluated. This project aimed to identify ways to improve implementation, effectiveness, and evaluation of the program, as well as formation of testable hypotheses to guide future suicide prevention research.   

In addition to her main research project, Dr. Soderlund also completed three other projects.  She collaborated with Dr. Erick Cheung (UCLA) on a Quality Improvement project titled “Shared Decision Making and Patient Satisfaction in the Inpatient Psychiatric Setting” which aimed to examine whether or not legal status, diagnostic agreement, psychiatric symptoms, and diagnoses are associated with certain dimensions of patient satisfaction scores. Dr. Soderlund also partnered with Dr. MarySue Heilemann (UCLA) on a mental health transmedia story-telling project. This project aimed to explore Latina’s experiences with a transmedia web-app that featured a Latina nurse-therapist character, Veronica Sanchez. The analysis led to development of a Grounded Theory called: Moving from passive viewer to active participant in a transmedia mental health web-app. Dr. Soderlund also was part of an NCSP 2018-2020 cohort group project that used a community partnered participatory research approach to facilitate a community-academic conference in South Los Angeles. Their aim was to amplify the community voices in order to identify and prioritize locally defined social determinants of health to combat historical inequities within South Los Angeles. Dr. Soderlund’s work during the NCSP fellowship resulted in several publications.  

Currently, Dr. Soderlund is a researcher with the University of Minnesota Duluth (UMD) Medical School, Medical Discovery Team (MDT). As part of the MDT, she is working as a health services researcher on community-based partnered research projects to help address health disparities and inequities with rural and indigenous populations within the Midwest and Canada.