January 2021

By Melba Newsome, Health Affairs, January 2021 By all accounts, it looked like twenty-eight-year-old Amelia Carmelo had turned her life around by the end of 2018. After more than a decade of heroin and opioid addiction, she had been free from illicit drugs for more than four years and was in a stable relationship. For the past year she’d driven thirty minutes each week to see her addiction counselor. Carmelo began her nascent recovery in early 2015 after spending several months in jail. She...

By Jessica Pryce and Amelia Franck Meyer, The Imprint, January 4, 2021 Although child welfare reform has been a topic of conversation for many years, what is often meant by “reform” is evolutionary or incremental change, which are efforts to make the current system better, but not fundamentally different. But many systems leaders who operate significantly improved versions of the current system agree that it still falls short of meeting the needs of families. The Biden administration...

By Gloria Huei-Jong Graf, Stanford Chihuri, Melanie Blow, and Guohua Li, Pediatrics, January 2021 CONTEXT: Given the wide-ranging health impacts of justice system involvement, we examined evidence for the association between adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and justice system contact in the United States. OBJECTIVE: To synthesize epidemiological evidence for the association between ACEs and justice system contact. DATA SOURCES: We searched 5 databases for studies conducted through...

By Ashley Burnside, The Center for Law and Social Policy, January 6, 2021 The latest COVID-19 relief bill passed by Congress will allow college students with low incomes to more easily access Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits – temporarily removing strict work and eligibility requirements for students. This is especially important given that unemployment rates are high, especially in the restaurant and entertainment sectors, and that many students are learning...

By Mary Chris Jaklevic, JAMA, December 16, 2020 As coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) surged last spring, pediatric surgeon Ala Stanford, MD, heard from Black residents in her hometown of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, who had symptoms but were hitting roadblocks in getting tested. Some lacked a physician’s referral. Others were turned away because they didn’t arrive in a car or didn’t meet criteria for testing. Testing sites were clustered in affluent White areas. Black residents, who were...

By Kathleen R. Page and Alejandra Flores-Miller, New England Journal of Medicine, January 7, 2021 In March 2020, when there were 30,000 confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States, one of us wrote about the pandemic’s effects on undocumented immigrants. 1 By August, there were about 50,000 new U.S. cases per day, and we had spent several months caring for patients with Covid-19. Today, revisiting the issues of anti-immigrant policies, limited access to care, language barriers, and the need...

RFQ ANNOUCEMENT: Celebrating Families! California Expansion Project – Cohort 2 Invitation to Expand Celebrating Families! Statewide The California State Office of Child Abuse Prevention (OCAP) recognizing the effectiveness of Celebrating Families! (CF!), has awarded Prevention Partnership International (PPI) a $158,333, 3- year challenge grant to (1) Identify, train and support agencies in California to provide CF! to children and families at high risk for abuse and neglect and (2) Establish...

The Office of Child Abuse Prevention (OCAP ) oversees California’s three Citizen Review Panels (CRPs). Each one focuses on a specific topic: child and family services, the prevention of child abuse and neglect, and critical incidents. The responsibilities of the CRPs involve evaluating child welfare policies, practices, and procedures, assessing systemic barriers, and making recommendations to improve and remove barriers. The CRPs can make recommendations that will improve the lives of...

From Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, January 5, 2021 Purpose Research shows that the earliest years of life are a critical period of human development. Young children’s earliest relationships and experiences have a strong influence on brain development and future health and well-being (Harvard University Center on the Developing Child 2016). Young children’s foundational relationships and experiences occur in the context of families and communities. Yet, some families do not have access to...

Written by: India Flinchum, Whitman College Community Fellow Program The Community Resilience Initiative (CRI) of Walla Walla, hosted its 8th annual “October is Resilience Month” (ORM) event in October, 2020. The aim of the yearly ORM series is to build resilience, encourage community-engagement, and inspire self-reflection among members of the Walla Walla community. Through community events and CRI-hosted learning modules, CRI welcomed the general public once again, opening its arms to...

Many people who struggle with addiction often struggle with a mental health disorder, as well. The most common mental health disorders include depression and anxiety, which afflict more than 8 million adults in the United States. Certain substances can bring out mental illness more intensely than others: for example, alcoholism, a depressant, can worsen a person’s depressed state. While humans are all susceptible to feelings of sadness every now and again, depression is more of a lingering...

By Jane C. Hu, Outside Online, December 3, 2020 When Aimee Gray woke up on a Sunday morning in October 2017, she decided she was finally going to get a new pair of shoes. She’d worn holes in her favorite Skechers, so when she and her husband headed into town for groceries, she stopped in the shoe store and treated herself to two new pairs. As they drove back to the home they rented on Bennett Ridge Road, in the hills southeast of Santa Rosa, California, her husband remarked on the strange,...