2024 Business Women Awards
WOMAN TO WATCH | HEALTH CARE SERVICES: Daisy Bassen
Thrive Behavioral Health Inc. medical director
DAISY BASSEN WANTED to have a career where she could help other people.
She was destined to be a service to others, thanks to her family. Both of her grandfathers were doctors and both of her parents were teachers.
“I felt like I wanted to do something every day that I felt was making a difference to somebody else that I could be sure about,” said Bassen, Thrive Behavioral Health Inc.’s medical director and child psychiatrist.
As a psychiatrist, Bassen works with children to best meet their needs, and keeps a dollhouse and organic lollipops in her office. As the Warwick-based health care nonprofit’s medical director, she oversees the medical team, including the nurse practitioners and other psychiatrists. Bassen is also involved in developing policy for the agency and is working to help Thrive Behavioral Health become a certified community behavioral health clinic.
Bassen has also been involved in education by offering Brown University students who are either studying medicine or who plan to go to medical school a shadowing opportunity elective. The elective allows Brown students to watch Bassen work with children attending Thrive’s Eleanor Briggs School, sit in on art therapy classes and meet with other staff.
She has also recently worked with interns who are planning to study medicine.
“At least one of them was so lit up by this experience that she’s coming back this summer to do research for her senior thesis,” Bassen said. “I feel very proud and happy about that.”
Bassen is involved with several other professional organizations, including currently serving as president of the Rhode Island Council of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, which she’s been part of since 2013. The organization focuses on advocacy work at the state and federal level on behalf of youths, and Bassen co-authored two advocacy grants the organization received. She is also a board member of National Alliance of Mental Illness Rhode Island.
Bassen says she is also drawn to the idea of making larger systemic changes for children that make it easier for large numbers of people and families to access care and get better.