Dr. Sandy Chung never planned to become a doctor.

She grew up in a trailer park, on Medicaid, the daughter of Chinese immigrants who couldn’t get professional jobs in the U.S. despite their advanced degrees.

Her mom sold clothes in a factory. Her dad was a waiter before the family eventually opened a Chinese restaurant.

And in the fourth grade, standing at a bus stop trying to figure out what to be when she grew up, the mother of one of her friends — who turned out to be an OR nurse — told her: “Sandy, you should become a doctor.”

That single sentence redirected her entire life.

Today, Dr. Sandy Chung is the past President of the American Academy of Pediatrics, the founder of the Virginia Mental Health Access Program (VMAP) — now a $15 million state-funded program that has handled over 13,000 consult calls — and the founder of Trusted Care Foundation, a nonprofit she built to match college students to careers across the healthcare ecosystem.

In this episode of Inspiring Women, host Laurie McGraw sits down with Dr. Chung at the WBL Summit to talk about how a single tragic case in 2017 — a 14-year-old patient with bipolar disorder who couldn’t access his psychiatrist in time, ran out of his medication, and ended up taking another person’s life in a parking lot fight — became the inflection point for a program that now exists to make sure no family ever falls through that crack again.