Yukiko comes to us from Honolulu, Hawaii with 20+ years of nursing experience. She worked as an RN for 4 years at one of the leading medical university hospitals in Tokyo, Japan, and the next 15 years as an RN at one of the regional hospitals in Honolulu. During her years as an RN Yukiko provided direct care to many oncology and geriatric patients and quite a few patients in their death and dying, and she felt firsthand the need for and importance of making palliative and hospice care more accessible to people with serious illnesses. It became her great desire to deliver quality palliative care to patients and their families as a provider, and to follow this ambition she attended and graduated from the George Washington University for her MSN and became a Board-Certified Adult Gerontology Primary Care Nurse Practitioner in 2020. Since then she has been working as an NP in an urgent & primary care setting in Honolulu to experience and manage various patients’ conditions and symptoms. Transitioning into hospice and palliative care by being awarded the PMG Hospice and Palliative Medicine APRN Fellowship is the realization of a dream for Yukiko. She and her husband, daughter age 10, and son age 7, are thrilled to be moving to Alaska to set down roots and begin an exciting new life.