NOVA EMDR CONSULTATION

Sonia Wisniewski, MSN, APRN, PMHNP-BC graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC) in 2017. She is a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner (PMHNP) at Chicago’s West Side Veteran Affairs Medical Center in the Trauma Recovery Program (TRP). In the TRP she assesses and provides veterans and active service members in the Chicagoland area, with a diagnosis of PTSD, measurement-based care using the gold standard of evidence-based therapies identified by VA/DoD Guidelines: Cognitive Processing Therapy (CPT), Prolonged Exposure (PE), and EMDR. Additionally, she provides medication management to veterans who are open to it and extensive education on coping skills such as grounding, mindfulness, and sleep hygiene. She approaches treatment plan formulation using a shared decision making model and holistic lens, looking at more than just mental health diagnoses and including the Whole Health initiative.

Ms. Wisniewski is very involved in the VA’s nationwide EMDR community in numerous ways. She is on the VA’s EMDR Research Committee on which she which organizes the Journal Club for the VA’s nationwide EMDR monthly meeting and is the Lead Site Investigator (LSI) at Jesse Brown VA Medical Center for a retrospective chart review of the efficacy of face to face versus online EMDR. She is also on the VA’s EMDR CEU Sub-Workgroup to ensure CEU’s presented meet ANCC’s standards for nurses to receive CEUs. She is VA certified in CPT and Advanced Safety Planning Intervention (ASPI). She has been awarded the Nightingale Award by colleagues at Jesse Brown and has precepted nurse practitioner students from UIC for years and was the recipient of UIC’s 2024 PMHNP Preceptor of the Year. These awards establish her excellence as a clinician and clinical preceptor of nurse practitioner students.