Tagged With "Health"
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Opinion: More Than Ever, We Must Prioritize the Mental Health and Well-being of Children [stanfordchildrens.org]
By Rachel Velcoff and Steven Adelsheim, Stanford Children's Health, June 8, 2020 The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically changed the lives of families across the country and left many adults feeling stressed, anxious, and struggling to cope. It has also put the mental health of our youngest and most vulnerable at risk. Now, three months into the pandemic, youth are experiencing further stress and trauma, as our country grapples with another profound crisis: the murder of George Floyd and the...
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COVID-19 and Demands for Racial Justice Underscore the Urgent Need to Advance CalAIM's Children's Behavioral Health Reform Effort [cachildrenstrust.org]
By California Children's Trust and California Alliance, June 2020 Our nation is experiencing the rage, grief, fear, and uncertainty of the compounding crises of a global pandemic, economic recession, and response to deeply rooted racial injustice in this country, all of which creates trauma for youth and demands leadership and swift action to strengthen the systems foundational to their healing. While the public narrative has painted COVID-19 as a shared common trauma, the reality is that...
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Single-Year 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) Downloadable Data Sets and Codebooks, and combined 2017-2018 State Comparison Maps and Tables are Now Available on the DRC [camhi.org]
From Data Resource Center on Child and Adolescent Health, June 10, 2020 The Data Resource Center (DRC), a project of the Child and Adolescent Health Measurement Initiative located at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health , under a cooperative agreement with the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Maternal and Child Health Bureau (MCHB), is excited to announce the release of the single-year 2018 National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) downloadable data sets and...
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COVID-19 Batters A Beloved Bay Area Community Health Care Center [californiahealthline.org]
By Rachel Sheier, California Healthline, June 11, 2020 A small band of volunteers started the Marin City Health and Wellness Center nearly two decades ago with a doctor and a retired social worker making house calls in public housing high-rises. It grew into a beloved community resource and a grassroots experiment in African American health care. “It was truly a one-stop shop,” said Ebony McKinley, a lifelong resident of this tightknit, historically black enclave several miles north of the...
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The Role of Community Colleges in Supporting Mental Health [ppic.org]
By Olga Rodriguez, Public Policy Institute of California, June 17, 2020 Mental health is the biggest issue students at California community colleges say they are facing during the pandemic. That is, 67% of students report higher levels of anxiety, stress, depression, or other mental distress. The sudden transition to an online learning environment drives some of this stress, as do struggles with job and income loss or paying for housing and utilities. For some students, the loss of income...
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Unarmed specialists, not LAPD, would handle mental health, substance abuse calls under proposal [latimes.com]
By Dakota Smith, Los Angeles Times, June 16, 2020 Several Los Angeles City Council members called Tuesday for a new emergency-response model that uses trained specialists, rather than LAPD officers, to render aid to homeless people and those suffering from mental health and substance abuse issues. A motion submitted by City Council members Nury Martinez, Herb Wesson, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Curren Price and Bob Blumenfield asks city departments to work with the Los Angeles Police Department...
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Racism's Effect on Health, and the Heartbreak of Being a Black Parent Right Now: California's Surgeon General Speaks [kqed.org]
By KQED Science, KQED, June 14, 2020 The coronavirus pandemic and the recent killing of George Floyd have brought longstanding racial inequities into sharp focus. One of those disparities concerns the high rate of coronavirus transmission among people of color. To talk about the intersection of race and health, KQED's Brian Watt spoke last week with California Surgeon General Dr. Nadine Burke Harris, who is known for her pioneering work on the role that childhood stress and trauma play on...
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Covered California extends time for uninsured residents to sign up for health coverage [sacbee.com]
By Cathie Anderson, The Sacramento Bee, June 24, 2020 Covered California announced Tuesday that it would extend a special enrollment period to July 31 to give Californians additional time to sign up for health insurance. It had been set to end June 30. As cases of COVID-19 surged in California, the agency’s board voted to give all uninsured Californians the opportunity to sign up for coverage. Typically, after open enrollment ends in January, only people who have a qualifying life event such...
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Northern California Youth Listening Sessions: Hearing the Voices of Youth Involved in the Foster Care and Juvenile Justice Systems
https://static1.squarespace.com/static/58eeb29cdb29d6de1df8ac76/t/5ed85f5b4c61935658893996/1591238520469/Youth+Listening+Sessions+Report.pdf Justin Martinez, 29, will be a first-generation graduate when he earns his psychology degree from San Francisco State University this month. Martinez was formerly a foster child and shared his story at a Youth Listening Session , an event where young people in the foster care and juvenile justice systems engage in honest dialogue and self-expression.
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How the COVID-19 Pandemic is Highlighting the Importance of Trauma-Informed Care: Q&A with Dr. Edward Machtinger [chcs.org]
By Meryl Schulman and Emma Opthof, Center for Health Care Strategies, Inc., July 7, 2020 COVID-19 and the stressors it is placing on individuals’ physical, emotional, and financial wellbeing create a new imperative for health care systems to look to trauma-informed care to support both patients and frontline workers. To learn more about how health care providers are using trauma-informed approaches to care in the current environment, the Center for Health Care Strategies (CHCS) recently...
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UCSF study shows health workers grappling with pandemic anxiety: 'It's exhausting' [sfchronicle.com]
By Mallory Moench, San Francisco Chronicle, July 21, 2020 Dr. Robert Rodriguez’s anxiety rises and falls with the number of coronavirus cases and deaths. Fear that he could get infected at his San Francisco General Hospital job, or bring the virus home, affects his sleep. He doesn’t hug his 16-year-old son as much. Other worried family members avoid interacting with him. The stress isn’t sustainable, he said. “If day after day, you’re waking up and dealing with patients that are extremely...
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Re: UCSF study shows health workers grappling with pandemic anxiety: 'It's exhausting' [sfchronicle.com]
I tried to read the article ("click here to read more"); however, it would not let me - - it said I needed to subscribe.
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28th Annual Latino Health Forum: Discrimination and Health (7-day Series) [latinohealthforum.org]
From Latino Health Forum, July 2020 The LATINO HEALTH FORUM is one of the bay area’s premier educational conferences. Our goals include: Inform professionals about some of the most relevant problems facing the Latino population in Sonoma County; Enhance access to health services; Encourage students and individuals to pursue careers in health and medicine; Facilitate networking among healthcare providers. Dates & Speakers: Please note: There are no presentations on Saturday 8/1 or Sunday...
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CHCF's Response to the COVID-19 Behavioral Health Crisis in California [chcf.org]
By Catherine Teare and Katherine Haynes, California Health Care Foundation, July 16, 2020 As the new coronavirus began spreading across the country, what was an infectious disease crisis also became a behavioral health emergency. Compared to a year ago, the rate of people reporting symptoms of anxiety and depression has tripled from April through June, according to the weekly Household Pulse Survey , a new product from the National Center for Health Statistics and the US Census Bureau. The...
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How a Pandemic Could Advance the Science of Early Adversity [jamanetwork.com]
By Danielle Roubinov, Nicole R. Bush, and W. Thomas Boyce, JAMA Pediatrics, July 27, 2020 The reach of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic is global, a health crisis with a ubiquity never before experienced. While the physical health consequences of COVID-19 appear to affect proportionally fewer children compared with adults, its psychosocial consequences may be magnified within families who consistently weather a landscape of severe stressors or adverse childhood experiences...
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A Proactive Approach to Student Wellness [mdlogix.com]
By Mdlogix, July 2020 Solano County Office of Education (SCOE) works hard to maximize behavioral health support to students in the county’s six independent school districts. Through a partnership with the county’s behavioral health department – which has been continuously expanded and strengthened over the past 11 years – SCOE has been able to support a variety of suicide prevention, mental health, and social emotional learning programs in school-based settings. Part of these initiatives...
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Culture of Health Prize 2021 Call for Applications [rwjf.org]
From Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, July 30, 2020 The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) Culture of Health Prize (the Prize) elevates the compelling stories of places where residents are working together to transform education, jobs, transportation, housing, and more so better health flourishes for all. A Culture of Health recognizes that where we live—such as our access to affordable homes, quality schools, good jobs, and reliable transportation—affects how long and how well we live.
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Medi-Cal Agency's New Head Wants to Tackle Disparities and Racism [californiahealthline.org]
By Samantha Young, California Healthline, July 29, 2020 When Will Lightbourne looked at the statistics behind California’s coronavirus cases, the disparities were “blindingly clear”: Blacks and Latinos are dying at higher rates than most other Californians. As of Monday, Latinos account for 45.6% of coronavirus deaths in a state where they make up 38.9% of the population, according to data collected by the California Department of Public Health. Blacks account for 8.5% of the deaths but make...
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San Francisco Puts Community Paramedics on Front Lines of the Pandemic [chcf.org]
By Claudia Boyd-Barrett, California Health Care Foundation, July 28, 2020 For San Francisco public health officials, it was a potential nightmare scenario. On May 7, a man experiencing homelessness tested positive for COVID-19. He had just visited the city’s Sobering Center, a facility in the South of Market district where intoxicated people can recover safely without being transported to overcrowded hospital emergency rooms. Before anyone realized the man had COVID-19, he had exposed 17...
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Historial Trauma Specialist Certification- Level 1
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ACEs Trauma Awareness Symposium
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Bringing hope and healing to all of us through all of us.
It is happening. The grand experiment of full school distance learning is on for teachers and families of California. Educators have been asked to source some sort of magic to heal the disease of a broken educational system as it crumbles under the pressures of inconsistent and insufficient funding, tremendous variance in school community capacity for distance learning, and countless organizational structures being taxed to their limits. The pandemic continues, job losses increase, and fires...
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Does racism make us sick? Amid a national reckoning, the question gains new importance [sfchronicle.com]
By Tatiana Sanchez, San Francisco Chronicle, August 24, 2020 Elaine Shelly has lived with multiple sclerosis for 30 years. But she said she still panics whenever she has to see a new neurologist because of racial discrimination she’s experienced in the past. Even getting a proper diagnosis for her illness was a battle. “I’d go to these neurologists who would tell me that Black people don’t get M.S. and that I must be mentally ill,” said Shelly, 63, of San Leandro. A former print journalist,...
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The Health Care System Has the Black Community in a Choke Hold [chcf.org]
By Vanessa Grubbs, California Health Care Foundation, August 4, 2020 It was the Black woman’s third trip to the emergency department because she was feeling short of breath. She was starting to panic. She knew the COVID-19 death toll was climbing and that it was far worse for Black people than white people , and yet the doctors told her to go home again. But this time she pleaded, “If you all don’t admit me to the hospital, I’m going to die. I can’t breathe.” This is the story told by Sheila...
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California colleges increase online mental health services to serve expected student need [edsource.org]
By Larry Gordon, Ed Source, August 31, 2020 With surveys showing that the pandemic is worsening anxiety and depression among college students, campus counseling centers across California are bracing for an expected sharp rise in the numbers of students seeking mental health services. Like most college and university classes, psychological therapy sessions switched to online — or on telephone — in March. The campuses say they will try their best to advertise, expand and improve those virtual...
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MHTTC Grief Sensitivity Virtual Institute Part 1
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COVID-19's Toll on Mental Health [ppic.org]
By Daniel Tan, Public Policy Institute of California, September 11, 2020 As the pandemic continues to threaten the physical health and well-being of many Californians, mental health professionals across the state have also acknowledged its widespread psychological impact. Although the mental health consequences of epidemics are not well documented—in part due to the rarity of these events— existing research shows an association between large-scale disasters and mental and behavioral...
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ACEs Aware Invests in Santa Barbara County, CA
September 10, 2020 Resilient Santa Barbara County is proud to support the efforts of the statewide ACEs Aware initiative, led by the California Department of Health Care Services and the Office of the California Surgeon General. This initiative seeks to change health outcomes and save lives by helping Medi-Cal providers understand the importance of screening for Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) and responding to patients with trauma-informed care. ACEs Aware offers Medi-Cal providers...
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California Children's Trust is Raising Awareness about the Youth Mental Health Crisis
Raising Awareness "How will we provide sanctuary for our kids? Protecting children from police surveillance, brutality and violence is critical to their health and well-being." In her NBC News op-ed, Dr. Rhea Boyd, CCT’s Director of Strategy and Equity, explains the life-long impact when children witness violence—in their schools, homes, neighborhoods. 1-click tweet An urgent and vital call to action from @CAChildrenTrust Director of Strategy and Equity @RheaBoydMD "How will we provide kids...
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On the Governor's Desk Now: Take Action on this California Legislation
Legislation SB 803 - Introduced by state Sen. Jim Beall What it does: The Bill will set up a standardized process to train and certify peer support specialists. Why it’s important: Medicaid allows federal dollars to help pay for peer support specialists – but only in states with a process for standardizing training and certifying workers. Passage of SB803 will greatly expand the network of support for people with mental illness, and compensate people who are already providing informal...
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ACEs screening pilot in L.A. County pivots, troubleshoots barriers to remote visits
This story is part of an occasional series about California-based pediatricians who are incorporating ACEs screening into their practices. In the first installment published in May, which you can find here , Dr. Amy Shekarchi and other team members had just launched their ACEs screening by phone. A community health worker from a clinic affiliated with Los Angeles County’s Department of Health Care Services recently called a teenage patient to find out if she ever felt unsafe in her home or...
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CALQIC Announces Grantees for its ACEs Learning and Quality Improvement Collaborative for 2020-2021 [careinnovations.org]
The Center for Care Innovations and our partners are pleased to announce the grant recipients of the California ACEs Learning and Quality Improvement Collaborative (CALQIC). Led by the UCSF Center to Advance Trauma-Informed HealthCare in partnership with CCI, the California Office of the Surgeon General, and the Rand Corporation, CALQIC is the learning and quality improvement arm of ACES Aware, the initiative led by the Office of the California Surgeon General and the Department of Health...
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A Proactive Approach to Student Wellness [mdlogix.com]
By Mdlogix, July 2020 Solano County Office of Education (SCOE) works hard to maximize behavioral health support to students in the county’s six independent school districts. Through a partnership with the county’s behavioral health department – which has been continuously expanded and strengthened over the past 11 years – SCOE has been able to support a variety of suicide prevention, mental health, and social emotional learning programs in school-based settings. Part of these initiatives...
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Designing for family needs: Del Norte County & Ready4K
Del Norte and Ready4K have been working together to create a program specifically designed to support the health and educational goals of this beautiful, remote corner of CA. We're so proud to share the story of what we've created together - a story that continues to unfold. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Nestled in the northwestern corner of California along the Oregon border, Del Norte County is one of the most rural communities in the most populous state in the country. It’s a land of towering Redwood...
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From Wildfires to Childhood Trauma, a Resilience Cooperative Transformed the Way Clinics Face the Unthinkable
What helped Sonoma health center staffers navigate one catastrophe after another was what they had learned about trauma in the Resilient Beginnings Collaborative.
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Bessel van der Kolk & Medicating Normal, a new film!
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Sacred Sons / Saturday Online Men's Circle
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Healthcare providers learn skills to prevent burnout, build resilience
It’s an enormous understatement to say that healthcare workers today are suffering. Every day, you hear interviews with nurses, physicians, social workers, and others in healthcare saying they’re pushed to the breaking point and beyond. But, by using skills taught in the Community Resiliency Mode l (CRM), even people under severe stress can weather the onslaught, do their work, and get along with colleagues. CRM is an evidence-based training program that’s being used by millions of people in...
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Looking for a supportive community? Join us! (Fee Free)
The Community of Practice (C of P) is an interdisciplinary, online platform for adults who are important to children. Among other topics, we explore how systems, environments, and documentation shape early childhood learning and wellness. We grow our ability to be curious about children's full-being, inherent wisdom by being curious about our own ways of knowing and inquiring. We are peer accompaniment with each other - support for the supporters of children, families, and communities. Join...
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An Essential Report to Help Children’s Mental Health Advocates Claim the Medi-Cal Entitlement
Dear Friends and Allies On behalf of the millions of California’s children entitled to mental health support and services, we are pleased to share this groundbreaking report: “ Meeting the Moment: Improving EPSDT Implementation in California to Address Growing Mental Health Needs .” READ THE REPORT Envisioned by the California Children’s Trust (CCT), and written by the National Center for Youth Law (NCYL) and the National Health Law Program (NHeLP), the report offers advocates and...
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Cultural Differences in Crisis Intervention
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CCT maps out 2021 -- Hope and Healing on the Horizon
Dear Friends and Allies, As we emerge from a year of crisis and despair, we are lifted by the hope of a new administration and the growing state and national consensus that we must respond at scale to the social and emotional challenges facing children. Challenges clearly driven by structural racism, the stabilization of poverty, and a culture that equates wealth with value, and fame with merit. CCT and our allies are doubling down on our commitment to reimagine children’s mental health as a...
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The Path Forward for Telemental Health + Join Our Upcoming Webinars
NO GOING BACK: Providing Telemental Health Services to California Children and Youth After the Pandemic, is the first in a series of briefs outlining how technology can make mental health more accessible with concrete recommendations based on providers’ perspectives, and lessons learned during the pandemic. Read the Report When the shelter-in-place mandate started, California’s mental and behavioral health providers quickly pivoted to telehealth delivery for children and adolescents. Recent...
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