Kristyn Ideker, NP
Kristyn joins our 11th Fellowship class as our first Palliative Care Psychiatry Nurse Practitioner Fellow.
After graduating from Loyola Marymount University with a BS in Biology in 1993, Kristyn moved to Seattle where she then pursued her Masters of Marine Affairs under a Graduate Research Assistantship award, studying climate change and water policy at the University of Washington. With her M.M.A, she went to work as an environmental consultant in a private firm contracting with local, regional and national governing bodies. After two years, she moved to Boston and taught biology and coached sailing for an all-boys high school in South Boston.
Two years later, she moved to San Diego and, after realizing her goal to enter nursing, in May 2006, she graduated at the top of her Masters Entry Program in Nursing class at USD. After graduation she worked on a cardiac telemetry unit at Scripps Memorial La Jolla Hospital for the next four years. During this tenure at Scripps she completed a fellowship with the Center for Evidence Based Practice Institute and ran a large prospective study at Scripps Memorial examining the usefulness of an aggressive behavior risk assessment tool. She recently published the results of this study in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Kristyn then realized her call to tend to the dying patient and joined San Diego Hospice Team 7, a team for patients in the last hours to days of life. While working on Team 7, she decided to pursue her interest in psychiatry and attended California State University, Long Beach on scholarship. This summer she successfully earned her Master of Science in Nursing in the School of Nursing’s Psych/Mental Health NP Program. Her thesis work examined the reliability and validity of a modified Karnofsky Performance Scale and she will be preparing the results for publication.
Kristyn is excited to have the opportunity to join her compassion for the dying patient and interest in psychiatry and to be mentored in palliative care psychiatry in the Fellowship Program at SDHIPM.