Tagged With "health"

By UCSF Continuing Medical Education, December 12, 2019 This is the fourth annual conference here in the Bay Area focusing on maternal mental health and well-being, with speakers from throughout the area covering important topics that will improve the care our patients are receiving. We welcome anyone with a personal or professional interest in maternal mental health. Participants will: Review the state of the current opioid crisis in this country and learn about tools to help identity...

By Andrea Schneider, PsychCentral, February 7, 2020 Did you know that the second leading cause of death in people ages 15-22 is suicide (ACHA, 2020)? Those are some sobering statistics. After a recent move from S CA to N Ca, I am currently serving in a new role in which I am the Lead Counselor on a college campus for this age range. Unfortunately, those statistics don’t lie. I am deeply involved in creating new programs, strategies, and direct clinical support for the students my campus...

By Erin Allday, San Francisco Chronicle, January 5, 2020 A screening tool developed by Bay Area pediatricians to identify adverse childhood experiences, ranging from homelessness and food insecurity to physical and sexual abuse, will now help doctors statewide address trauma affecting patients’ health. The California Department of Health Care Services approved the tool — called PEARLS, for Pediatric ACEs and Related Life-Events Screener — last month. As of Jan. 1, its use is covered by...

By Elissa S. Epel, The American Journal of Psychiatry, January 1, 2020 There has been growing scientific interest in telomere biology over the 35 years since its fundamental mechanisms were deciphered. Telomeres, the finely regulated protective caps at the tips of our chromosomes, play a critical role in aging, from yeast to humans. Telomeres are made of long, winding strands of repeat sequences of noncoding DNA, covered with protective proteins. Although their regulation and functions are...

Picture yourself in a massive San Francisco hotel ballroom, surrounded by a thousand health professionals with a shared passion for changing the landscape of health using a seemingly unlikely lever: reducing adverse childhood experiences (ACEs). You haven’t read much about ACEs, but what you are learning is revelatory. You hear that childhood traumatic events drastically affect the human mind and body – not just immediately after the traumatic event, but into and through adulthood. You learn...

By Kristen Harknett and Daniel Schneider, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, February 14, 2020 What’s the Issue? Work has become more precarious in America over the past half century as employers have transferred more of the risks and uncertainties of doing business onto workers and households. As part of this shift, many workers have experienced an erosion of job quality—reductions in the real value of their wages; a loss or cutback of fringe benefits such as retirement plans and health...

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...

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...

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...

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,...