Asha Byrd Prioritizes Connection When Caring for Her Patients at the Sacramento Native American Health Center

“This role was everything I wanted in terms of being able to give back to the community that I grew up in and also the Native American community.”

April 16, 2025

By Jennifer Walker

Before becoming a physician associate, Asha Byrd had two pivotal experiences that showed her the importance of building connections with diverse patient populations. The first was in 2015 as a volunteer with the Sacramento Native American Health Center in Sacramento, California, near to where Byrd grew up. The second was one year later as an intern with the Northeastern Tribal Health System in Miami, Oklahoma, serving the surrounding Native American community, including the Shawnee Tribe of which Byrd and her father are citizens.

“The chronic health issues that these communities were dealing with were more extensive and expansive than I’d seen in the past,” Bryd said. “It drew me in even more, seeing how much of an effect you could have by creating a good rapport with these patients who didn’t have trust in the healthcare system. I was able to help them overcome those social and economic barriers that they usually ran into at other health clinics.”

Byrd has taken her commitment to building rapport with patients—along with her belief in the importance of providing holistic services to underserved populations—into her current role as a PA with the Sacramento Native American Health Center. The center, whose patient population is 12 percent Native American, offers a range of multidisciplinary services, including behavioral health, chiropractic services, dental, optometry, psychiatry, and traditional herbal medicine. Byrd works with a diverse team of providers, which allows for deeper connections and builds further trust when caring for patients.

“I have such a great respect for my own heritage, and I wanted to bring my identity of being a multi-ethnic individual to a role in a healthcare center,” said Byrd, whose father is Native American and mother is South Asian. “I could relate to my patients and understand a little more deeply about their backgrounds and some of the barriers they had encountered in the past.”

The Route to Primary Care and Serving the Underserved
Byrd became interested in joining the PA field through her participation in the Four Directions Summer Research Program at Harvard Medical School (now held at Brigham and Women’s Hospital) during the summer of 2015. Through this program, which enrolls college students who are committed to serving Native American communities, Byrd took on a pediatric genetics research project with a faculty member. She also shadowed various medical professionals, including PAs in emergency medicine, family medicine, and other specialties.

“That’s where I found out more about the PA profession,” Byrd said. “I love being able to switch specialties if the community I work with has a need or if my interests change.”

After getting her undergraduate degree, Byrd spent some time as a medical scribe at UC Davis Medical Center, a medication technician at a senior living center, and a hospice volunteer providing respite care. She then attended the PA program at Rocky Mountain College of Health Professionals, graduating in 2021 as the country was getting back to normal following the COVID-19 pandemic. Byrd then took a position at Advanced Pain Diagnostics and Solutions, a chronic pain management clinic in Sacramento.

There, Byrd created holistic treatment plans for patients that included medication management, interventional spinal cord procedures, and surgeries, and she set up her patients with other modalities like physical therapy and acupuncture to help with their pain. It was a role she found valuable because she could take the tools and resources she learned about and bring them with her into other specialties.

About three years later, that is exactly what Byrd did when she joined the Sacramento Native American Health Center, where she continues to build relationships with her patients and champion holistic services. “Our goal is to provide culturally competent and holistic care and a safe space, while also offering as many resources as we possibly can to those who face social, economic, and environmental barriers to healthcare,” she said. “This role was everything I wanted in terms of being able to give back to the community that I grew up in and also the Native American community, specifically the underserved community in an urban setting.”

Offering Holistic Services and Building Relationships
At the Sacramento Native American Health Center, Byrd, a member of the primary care team, sees 20 to 25 patients a day. Rather than having a set plan, she keeps an open mind during these interactions, asking patients how they would like to find a solution to their acute or chronic ailments and offering multiple options for treatment. “It’s about letting them be the driver of their own health,” she said.

For example, Byrd sees many patients who are cautious about taking medications. It is important for her as a provider to try to understand their feelings. Some of the patients may have had negative experiences with the healthcare system. Others have different beliefs and are more open to alternative methods of treatment.

“There might be one or two medications that they are open to taking when it comes to certain chronic illnesses,” she said. “But otherwise, they might prefer trying different supplements, naturopathic remedies, or herbals that may help them just as much and that they feel more comfortable taking.”

Byrd also finds tremendous value for patients in the center’s holistic offerings, particularly because it allows for providers to do “warm handoffs.” This is when they gently introduce patients who are in need of additional services to professionals in other specialties within the center. Byrd might do this for patients who come in because of substance use, which represents a significant portion of the patient population, among other conditions.

“I’ll see patients who are needing a bit more urgent medical attention when it comes to feeling safe at home or responding to a mental health crisis, and I can call one of our behavioral health specialists, who will come to meet them and get them set up with a session for a full intake,” she said. “That allows the patient to feel like they’re getting more care when they immediately need it and to know that there are other resources to lean on within our clinic.”

While providing this type of care to all of her patients is important to Byrd, it’s particularly meaningful for her to serve the Native American community in Sacramento, where she grew up and now resides. With these patients, Byrd will share that she also has a Native background. “The immediate glimmer of hope or a smile that I get from them and being able to share stories with them is very heartwarming,” she said. “These communities have been marginalized or have not had the light shined upon them in terms of what they’ve gone through and all the barriers they’ve had to face over the years. It encourages me to continue to provide care for them.”

Jennifer Walker is a freelance writer in Baltimore, MD. Contact Jennifer at [email protected].

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