Katherine completed her DNP program and became certified as a Psychiatric Mental Health NP in 2010. She has been inducted into the American Association of Nurse Practitioners as a Fellow in 2015, a prestigious recognition for her accomplishments as a nurse practitioner in clinical practice and policy contributions.

She has clinically practiced in community mental health outpatient clinics, inpatient acute hospitals, and has owned her own private practice from 2014 to 2016 in Fayetteville, Ark. She is a contractor for outpatient psychiatric mental health care in outpatient clinics currently. She is negotiating with agencies to provide crisis stabilization care for the new Crisis Stabilization Units, recently awarded grant funds, to provide care to individuals with psychiatric emergencies who have meet with the law with a goal to potentially divert them from jail and legal involvement.

Katherine Darling is active in AR and national associations including Arkansas Nurse Practitioner Association (ANPA), Arkansas Nurses Association (ARNA), and the American Association of Nurse Practitioners (AANP). She has been the current AANP Arkansas State Representative since 2013. She is the founder of ANPA in 2014 and a current Board member. She serves as the Co-Chair of the ANPA Legislative and Policy Committee and the interim Political Action Committee.

Katherine is a founding member of the Arkansas Nurses Roundtable in 2017, a statekholder group of advanced practice specialty nursing and association groups created to advise and promote legislative policy for NPs in AR. She has facilitated the introduction of four bills that were heard before the Arkansas legislature in 2017 and collaborated with a grassroots campaign to activate fellow professionals, legislators, and patients and their families to work through the legislative process towards improving access to care within Arkansas.

She has met with the leadership of the State Targeted Response Team which is led by the Arkansas Department of Health. She and a select group of key nurse practitioner are building relationships with the task force, which has received an 8-million-dollar grant from SAMSHA, to target the opioid epidemic in Arkansas. As the Arkansas Representative of the AANP, she is working to gain statistics regarding potential APRN providers of buprenorphine treatment and will be working to increase the numbers of nurse practitioners in the state who will acquire the mandatory training to obtain the DEA waiver required for opioid use disorder treatment with buprenorphine.