Lisa Wallace, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC
Director of Addiction Medicine and Nurse Practitioner | ChristianaCare
Wilmington, DE, UNITED STATES
Lisa Wallace, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC, is a nurse practitioner with ChristianaCare’s inpatient Addiction Medicine Service.
Biography
Lisa Wallace, MSN, APRN, FNP-BC, is a nurse practitioner with ChristianaCare’s inpatient Addiction Medicine Service. She also serves in the capacity of Director of Addiction Medicine. In these roles, she cares for patients with substance use disorders and develops policies and protocols aimed at providing safe and effective care to patients with substance use disorders. Wallace also educates caregivers and community members about substance use disorder and its management.
Areas of Expertise (1)
Addiction Medicine
Media Appearances (2)
An Inside Look at Opioid Addiction in Delaware
Delaware Today online
2023-09-29
As director of Addiction Medicine Services at ChristianaCare, Lisa Wallace sees daily how drugs ravage the body. Patients come in with bacterial infections that attack the heart valves, which causes abscesses in the brain and vertebrae. They arrive with devastating skin- and soft-tissue injuries that require skin grafting and, in the worst cases, can lead to amputations. Healthcare providers simultaneously treat these issues and the complications of addiction. A nurse practitioner whose career spans more than 36 years, Wallace says she wants people struggling with substance abuse to feel safe coming to the hospital. “We want to effectively manage whatever opioid withdrawal they are having and to address their pain. “Often, patients delay seeking much-needed medical treatment because they fear how they will be treated by healthcare providers,” she continues. “And they fear inadequate management of withdrawal and pain. Our patients need understanding and acceptance as much as they need medical treatment.”
He almost lost his arms to addiction. But Christiana Hospital did more than save his limbs
The News Journal print
2023-10-02
The staff at the Stanton facility, he said, treated him as they would any other patient. Lisa Wallace, nurse practitioner and director of ChristianaCare’s addiction medicine program, said this is intentional. “Substance use disorder is a disorder of the brain,” she said. “It is a chronic, relapsing and remitting disease just like any other chronic disease like heart disease or diabetes, and it needs to be treated as such.” While the health care system has long understood this – it's also something that those at the forefront of the nation’s opioid crisis have tried to stress for years – it has only recently gained significant traction elsewhere. In part, this is because the stigma surrounding drug use is so powerful. For decades, the prevailing belief among many – which is changing, albeit slowly – is that users choose this life.
