Mental health service close to home

Published 3:06 pm Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Jenna Westendorf, DNP, PHMNP is helping provide mental health services to rural Iowa.
Westendorf is dual certified as a Family Practice Nurse Practitioner and a Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner at Burgess Family Clinic.
She specializes in: new mental health diagnoses (ADHD, Bipolar Disorder, Depression, Anxiety, etc); psychiatric medication evaluation and management; diagnostic clarification for complex presentations; patients who have failed multiple medication trials or are not responding to treatment; behavioral and psychological symptoms of dementia (including nursing home residents); complex psychiatric cases requiring specialty consultation and family practice
She previously worked as a nurse with Burgess Home Health and Hospice. While caring for
people in their homes, Jenna saw firsthand how mental health affected patients and families and
how the limited local resources could make getting help more difficult.
“As a nurse you wanted to help these patients and give them resources and we just don’t have very many resources (mental health) around here,” she said.
Westendorf knew she wanted to go back to school and become a family nurse practitioner and learned that Iowa offers a dual program where you could do family and psych mental health.
“I enrolled in that because I thought, well I guess we’ll create some resources,” she said. She graduated with her dual degree in August 2025 and started seeing patients in February of 2026 (after returning from maternity leave).
Westendorf said it is important to offer mental health resources in small communities.
“In school they call them the upstream factors of what prohibits patients from getting care; like lack of transportation or maybe they share a car with their family members or maybe they don’t have the gas money to get up to the city for an appointment,” she said. “There are lots of factors of why they don’t seek care, so I think it was important to have the resource here locally to where they could maybe have those specialties available to them.”
When visiting with patients, Westendorf does more of the med management side of things not necessarily therapy, although she utilize therapeutic techniques.
“My first visit with them I get an hour to go over their whole psychiatric history and kind of like their history of what meds have they tried and not liked, different diagnoses they’ve gotten, and then I can diagnose, treat, adjust their meds,” she said.
When she meets with patients about mental health, she visits with them in her office instead of an exam room. She sees patients in both Mapleton and Sloan.
She receives several referrals from Burgess primary care providers and with an end goal to hopefully gain more outside referrals from other clinics.
“I would love to see other patients from other clinics and work in collaboration with their primary care provider,” she said. “Kind of like a specialty care.”
Westendorf said mental health is important because it trickles down into everything.
“If we can’t take care of our mental health first, how do we take care of our physical health? And if we have anxiety, depression, that affects our sleep, and then our sleep affects everything. It just all ties in together,” she explains. “It kind of just starts there.”
Since starting to see patients, Westendorf said it has been well received and they have seen anywhere from young kids to older adults, all different kinds of occupations.
Westendorf said her favorite part when working with patients is seeing the small wins.
“It’s kind of nice to have this service close to home,” she added.
She has also gone to nursing homes as she has started going to Maple Heights Nursing Home, mostly just as a consult service.
“They already have their primary care provider come around, but maybe they have a really difficult dementia and they’re needing help managing that, or they’re really down and depressed and need help managing that,” Westendorf said.
Westendorf grew up in Correctionville and went to the University of Iowa for her schooling. She met her husband, who is from Onawa, when at Iowa. They reside in Onawa with their son.