McKinley is a native to the Richmond area and completed her undergraduate bachelor’s degree in nursing at VCU. She graduated Cum Laude in 2003. She worked as a registered nurse for 10 years in a variety of specialty areas, including medical-surgical, orthopedics-neurology, and obstetrics-gynecology. While working on the OB/GYN specialty unit at Henrico Doctors’ Hospital, she was a member of both the Unit Practice Council and Antepartum Committee. She later returned to VCU and earned her Master of Science degree as a family nurse practitioner in 2013. While completing her graduate studies, she was inducted into the Phi Kappa Phi Graduate Student Honor Society and the Sigma Theta Tau Nursing Honor Society.
In her role as a family nurse practitioner, she began working at Chippenham Medical Center in the pre-admissions testing department, while also working as a clinical adjunct faculty member in the Bachelor of Science in Nursing program at South University. In 2015, she began working as a hospitalist at Henrico Doctors’ Hospital. As a hospitalist, McKinley was responsible for independently managing patient care for both critically ill and general medical patients in the acute care setting. She has also served on the Henrico Doctors’ Hospital ethics committee. She has additional experience working in palliative medicine at Bon Secours, which involved caring for patients and families living with serious illnesses and helping them to maximize their quality of life through discussing care decisions, treating overwhelming symptoms, and alleviating psychosocial distress.
McKinley has had a life-long interest in holistic health practice. During her undergraduate years, she spent a summer in Belize taking a course on natural healing, which involved learning from local healers about plant medicine and jungle survival techniques. She has always felt strongly that the best health care comes from treating the whole patient, including the mind, body, and spirit. Her interest in Functional medicine grew through her own journey towards better health. Over the years, she has struggled with being overweight, having low energy, poor sleep, and frequent gastrointestinal complaints. From her experience as a nurse and nurse practitioner, she was aware of how to treat the symptoms she was experiencing, but wanted to get to the root cause of the problems in order to truly feel better. By incorporating Functional and Integrative medicine practices and lifestyle modifications, she has been able to accomplish this on a personal level and feels passionate about helping others to do the same.
In her free time, she enjoys spending time with her family, including her two daughters. She is an animal lover and enjoys playing with her dog and two cats. She loves being out in nature, traveling, dancing, and reading.