A remarkable provider puts Vashon on the map with her recent award
This might seem like a charming local story: Vashon has a practitioner whose advanced studies in psychiatric nursing are a great benefit to Islanders. But the old saying, “if you want to change the world, start locally” could not be more applicable. Just recently, Dr. Marli Parobek APRN DNP FNP PMHNP, was recognized by her professional association, the American Association of Nurse Practitioners. The 2025 State Award for Outstanding Contributions recognizes not just excellence in clinical work, but also work to advance the state of nursing in society.
Healing Islanders and changing the world. It sounds like the sort of sound bite a corporate PR team would use. And yet, it’s the literal description of what Dr. Parobek does on Vashon. How does one get singled out for statewide professional recognition? In Dr. Parobek’s case, it took first-rate nursing, a tireless commitment to her patients, mentoring the next generation of professionals, and contributing to health care policy in Washington State.
Dr. Parobek started as an ER nurse in Ohio. Even as she worked her “day job,” providing care in this demanding environment, she saw that a nurse’s experience and perspective would be better used if the scope of responsibility was expanded. Supported – even urged – by her husband to pursue the training, in 2005 she was certified as a Family Nurse Practitioner. She continued working in the same hospital system, which she still remembers as holding the highest standards of care and ethics. It was the perfect place to grow into her first major step in advanced nursing.
But the bigger world presently beckoned, and with an economic slump in the Ohio area, she and her husband looked west. This is where Dr. Parobek’s innovative self-reliance came to the forefront. When her husband identified Yakima as a promising destination, she called the local hospitals, only to discover that there were no positions that would match her skills. Undeterred, she called her chosen Yakima hospital and acted as if there were such a position!
This opened the path to conversations with the right people, and presently Dr. Parobek was hired into a position that existed only by virtue of her own imagination and force of personality. Being the first ER nurse practitioner at the hospital, she had to help them determine her pay scale. And thus began another recurring pattern in her career – helping an institution put together new protocols and procedures – in this case, guiding them in how to use their first ER nurse practitioner.
Dr. Parobek flourished in her position, receiving her first major statewide award in 2009. When she identified a need for an urgent care facility, she worked with a physician at the hospital to open one in some unused space at one end of their facility. It was recognized as a financial success by the administrators and was eventually funded and upgraded to a fully built-out clinic.
In addition to the Yakima ER and urgent care responsibilities, on an occasional basis, Dr. Parobek would also work at a local Resident Care Facility, Yakima Valley School, in Selah, WA. An old building once used to care for tuberculosis patients, the RCF now served patients with acute medical needs, such as those who could neither communicate nor feed themselves. In 2009, the Department of Social and Health Services recruited Dr. Parobek to take responsibility for the overall delivery of medical care at the facility. Once again, she was defining protocols, policies, and procedures – except it was now for an entire medical facility, serving a diverse and very vulnerable range of patients.
Advanced certification and degrees at this point in her career called for a university-level nursing degree, and this is where Frontier Nursing University entered Dr. Parobek’s life. Founded in 1939 as Frontier Nursing Service, it trained and sent out nurses and midwives – sometimes on horseback – to reach and serve the rural communities of Kentucky. Continuously operating ever since, even as it has modernized, FNU has kept that spirit of fearless commitment to rural and underserved patients.
A program originally for nurses on horseback, FNU has always trained its students to identify the appropriate medical care, and then ensure its implementation, no matter what challenges existed. Given their rural focus, remote learning was a requirement, and FNU first offered distance learning in 1989 – mailing lessons and receiving completed work in return. When the internet became available, FNU dropped the mailings in favor of online teaching, all while carefully preserving the fundamental nature and quality of their programs.
Periodic visits to the main campus by students, along with a mentorship program using “preceptors,” ensured that students truly mastered their subject area. The upheaval of COVID in 2019 let all of FNU’s strengths come to the fore. Their training already integrated the internet and remote learning. They already taught service in the face of adversity and uncertainty, even in environments where the practitioner could only count on themselves. Ironically, a university founded under the shadow of a world war emerged as powerful resource of medical hope and competence – precisely what was needed in 2020.
And Dr. Parobek was in the middle of it. She received her Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner degree from FNU and immediately continued towards her Doctor of Nursing Practice. The highest level of educational achievement in the nursing profession, the DNP is a true PhD-level doctoral program with coursework and dissertation. Dr. Parobek completed her defense just one day before the nation locked down due to COVID.
Dr. Parobek and her husband had been personally aware of Vashon as far back as 2010, and had enjoyed many vacation visits. In 2018, she noticed a “Vashon Youth and Family Services” sign, and thus began her campaign to get hired at VYFS. Her contact at VYFS continued to tell her “no, we’re not hiring” as she checked in every six months or so, but in 2021 it became a “yes.” Dr. Parobek knew Vashon needed its own prescribing psychiatric nurse practitioner, and finally it would have one. She and her husband packed up and moved, taking on eight monthly hours of VYFS work, continuing remote consulting with her existing client base (along with periodic in-person travels back to Yakima), and starting to build her Vashon-based practice.
The move was a success. Dr. Parobek’s work at VYFS has grown, and she’s a part of a robust regional network of referrals for patients with psychiatric needs. Her alma mater FNU has also remained in her life, and Dr. Parobek gives back by helping its students prepare for a new level of responsibility and self-reliance. While FNU students all have experience as registered nurses, they often have never been “out in the world,” providing psychiatric medical care one-on-one in a small office, or right in the patient’s home.
As one of FNU’s preceptors, Dr. Parobek takes FNU students with her into actual appointments, helping them begin to find in themselves what it takes to be the provider. A nurse at a hospital has a number of fellow professionals available; on Vashon, the next nearest medical expertise might be hours away.
Winning the 2025 State Award for Outstanding Contributions is a milestone in Dr. Parobek’s professional life. The president of FNU, Dr. Brooke A. Flinders DNP, RN, APRN-CNM, FACNM, was on Vashon just recently, visiting with Dr. Parobek as a part of her multi-state tour to recognize and honor outstanding practitioners. Dr Parobek can guide the medical response to a psychiatric crisis. She can prescribe and refine a treatment regimen. She can design the protocols that run a medical care facility. (This author also guesses that she can also still do stitches.)
But, as FNU’s Dr. Flinders pointed out, a DNP is even more than that; a DNP is prepared to also work in the world of policy. And indeed, Dr. Parobek has made some initial contacts over in Olympia, hoping to use her experience to guide lawmakers in areas as diverse as nursing compensation, credentials, and treatment standards. In addition, Drs. Flinders and Parobek are collaborating to create a new preceptor program that will enable Family Nurse Practitioner students from FNU to connect with psychiatric nurse practitioners in Washington.
How does Dr. Parobek measure her success? It’s not the degrees, neither is it the money. It’s not the policies she’s written, nor the awards she’s won. Her true measure of success will never fit into a corporate metric, because it’s the people she’s helped. To her, the ultimate indication of success is when her patients trust her so much that they recommend her to their own family members, and even trust her with their own children.
