Top Docs: Sarah Benrath, PNP-BC, MPH, MSN

Sarah Benrath, PNP-BC, MPH, MSN has a long list of letters behind her name, signifying that she’s a pediatric nurse practitioner with master’s degrees in public health and nursing — bona fides she brings to her work with youth at Mosaic Community Health in Central Oregon. In addition to its main clinic in Bend, Mosaic runs school-based health centers in Bend, Redmond, Madras and Crook County, allowing anyone in the community to come in for care.

In that role, Benrath provides care to kids from infancy through young adulthood, serving her patients in both English and Spanish.

“This is actually my second career,” Benrath told the Source. “I used to work in in public health and youth development, and I did experiential education and summer camps and outdoor ed, and I really loved it. I loved working with kids, but also, it’s a weird job where you live in the woods for months at a time in these funny cabins.”

“I feel so lucky to work with a team. To not be doing it on your own — it’s really nice to have a team.”

That work wasn’t conducive to family life, she said, but her desire to work with kids didn’t go away. The next step, then, was inspired by Benrath’s two childhood pediatricians, who had practices in Benrath’s hometown, here in Bend.

“She was just lovely,” Benrath said of one of her doctors. “When I was a teenager, it… just felt like a person like that was showing up for me, or that cared what happened to me, and that was really important for me.”

Benrath went on to do an accelerated nursing program and a master’s program at the University of Pennsylvania. From there, she worked at Seattle Children’s Hospital until the Covid-19 pandemic, when, with two small children, she and her family moved back to Bend.

“When I was at Seattle Children’s, I worked in a historically Black neighborhood within the central district of Seattle, with families that were high risk or just vulnerable families that had lots of different needs,” Benrath explained. “Here, I work with a different population, but still very high needs, high social needs, and it’s really hard work, but also really rewarding work.”

Over the years, the needs of youth have shifted, she said.

“I’ve been doing this for almost 15 years, and we see more mental health concerns in teenagers than we did when I in the first 10 years of my career,” she said. “These last five years have been much heavier, in that sense.”

As part of its mission to offer comprehensive care to the under-insured and uninsured people it serves, Benrath and a team of colleagues at Mosaic lead a primary-care-based eating disorder program, unique to Mosaic. Outside of Portland, no specialty eating disorder care exists in the state of Oregon, she said.

“Central Oregon has a lot of great things, but we don’t always have a lot of specialty care for kids,” she related. “Mosaic really saw that there has been a greater number of youth struggling with disordered eating since the pandemic, and it’s probably something that’s always been there. It’s just one of those layers that has peeled back.”

Several times a month, Benrath, along with a behavioral health clinician and a nutritionist, conduct multidisciplinary visits where patients see all three professionals at once. Then a care coordinator, a nurse, helps manage referrals to specialty care. Visits all in one day help reduce the burden on busy families, Benrath said.

“When I was in school they gave us one vision of what a person with an eating disorder looks like,” she said. “It’s actually so complex, and often there’s a lot of trauma involved. It’s a really heartbreaking illness, and to see people make progress is so incredible, and I just tell everybody that I see in there that it’s not linear.”

While her employer called out Benrath as a provider worth noting in our “Top Docs” feature, Benrath sees collaboration and teamwork as the really noteworthy part.

“I feel so lucky to work with a team. To not be doing it on your own — it’s really nice to have a team.”