She grew up in a trailer park, on Medicaid, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who couldn't get professional jobs in the U.S. despite their advanced degrees.
Her mom sold clothes in a factory.
Her dad was a waiter before the family eventually opened a Chinese restaurant.
And in the fourth grade, standing at a bus stop trying to figure out what to be when she grew up, the mother of one of her friends — who turned out to be an OR nurse — told her: "Sandy, you should become a doctor."
That single sentence redirected her entire life.
Today, Dr. Sandy Chung is the past President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the founder of the Virginia Mental Health Access Program (VMAP) — now a $15 million state-funded program that has handled over 13,000 consult calls — and the founder of Trusted Care Foundation, a nonprofit she built to match college students to careers across the healthcare ecosystem.
In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Dr. Chung to talk about how a single tragic case in 2017 — a 14-year-old patient with bipolar disorder who couldn't access his psychiatrist in time, ran out of his medication, and ended up taking another person's life in a parking lot fight — became the inflection point for a program that now exists to make sure no family ever falls through that crack again.
This episode is part of a six-episode collaboration between Inspiring Women and WBL (Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation). WBL is a network of senior executive women working to elevate more women into healthcare's C-suite and boardrooms — and longtime WBL member Laurie McGraw brings six of its leaders to the show to share what they've built and what they want the next generation to know.
They discuss:
- Why 1 in 5 people have a diagnosable mental health condition, and why the national shortage of child psychiatrists will not be solved by training more child psychiatrists
- The patient case from 2017 that exposed every system failure in pediatric mental health, and how Dr. Chung turned grief into the model that became VMAP
- Why pediatricians were taught to refer mental health cases out, and why that model has completely broken down in an era of six-month wait lists
- How VMAP trains primary care clinicians, gives them a specialist consult line, and connects families to care navigators, and how it expanded to cover autism diagnosis and maternal mental health
- Why independent physician practices matter, why the financial pressure on them is unprecedented, and what we lose when every doctor becomes an employee
- How growing up working in her parents' Chinese restaurant taught Dr. Chung the business skills most physicians never learn
- Why she founded Trusted Care Foundation to expose college students to the full range of careers inside healthcare, beyond the five jobs most kids think exist
- Her three rules for the next generation of women leaders: always be curious, never say no, and always assume it will work
Dr. Sandy Chung is proof that the largest systems in American healthcare can be reshaped by one physician who refuses to accept that this is just how things are.