Justina N. Anyanwu

Where her care comes from

Justina Anyanwu is a nurse first. She began at the bedside on a transplant and trauma unit at a major academic medical center, caring for people recovering from organ transplants and serious injury. That work shaped a habit that has never left her: paying close attention to how the body and its medications interact.

Neuro intensive care came next, treating brain injury and stroke, and then years in a hospital critical care unit, where she was promoted to charge nurse and recognized for clinical excellence. Managing ventilated patients, continuous dialysis, and high-risk intravenous medications taught precision under pressure, with very little margin for error — and showed her, day after day, how illness changes mood, behavior, and thinking.

Advanced practice

After earning her Master of Science in Nursing and board certification as an Adult Nurse Practitioner, she expanded her role into advanced practice nursing — outpatient primary care, then skilled nursing, where she managed chronic disease alongside a steadily growing number of behavioral and psychiatric needs: depression, anxiety, dementia-related psychosis, and mood disorders that were often under-recognized and under-treated.

Those years convinced her that psychiatric care for older and medically complex patients was where she could do the most good.

Psychiatric practice

Her work with older adults in skilled-nursing and rehabilitation settings has centered on exactly that: psychiatric evaluation, medication management, dementia-related behavioral care, crisis assessment, and family education, along with leading polypharmacy review and advance care planning. She completed her Doctor of Nursing Practice at Augusta University and, more recently, her post-graduate Psychiatric Mental Health Nurse Practitioner certificate there, earning board certification as a PMHNP.

Rosecare Behavioral Health is where that combination — bedside medicine, geriatric experience, and formal psychiatric specialization — is now available to adults and older adults directly.

Why that background matters to a patient

Psychiatric symptoms rarely exist on their own. Sleep, pain, thyroid function, infection, kidney and liver function, and the side effects of other medications all shape how a person feels and thinks. Years of caring for medically complex patients mean Justina is used to asking those questions early, and to prescribing carefully when the usual choices need to be reconsidered. It does not replace psychiatric training — she holds that too — but it informs how she applies it.

How she practices

Thoroughness, safety, and respect. She takes the time to understand what is happening — medically and psychiatrically — before recommending anything. She watches medications closely and removes what is no longer needed. And she speaks with patients and families the way she would want her own family spoken to.