Saving Our Caregiver Workforce with Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) Interventions

In 2021, direct care staff turnover in our agency was close to 35%. We are a treatment foster family agency and residential therapeutic program for youth and families impacted by the child welfare and juvenile justice systems. In a field where stability and consistency of healthy relationships is vital to the success of our clients, this was a crisis.

Bringing Accompaniment to Inpatient Clinical Spaces: The Creation of a Health Advocate Program for Black Inpatients at UCSF Health

Nationwide, Black patients who are admitted to the hospital experience disparities in pain management, patient communication, length of stay, and readmission rates. This disparity is seen at UCSF Health, where black inpatients have lower patient communication scores, higher lengths of stay in the hospital, and higher readmission rates than the rest of the patient population. In addition, there is limited engagement and input from community members in the care that hospitalized patients receive at UCSF Health.

Yes, Your Voice Matters

The City of Compton, California and community of North Long Beach, California continue to experience extraordinary barriers to lifesaving medical care. With the highest rates of maternal mortality, infant mortality, and homicide in Los Angeles County, these areas lack essential lifesaving medical services including, a high-risk hospital-based birthing center, a neonatal intensive care unit, and a level-one trauma center.

“DARE” TO WIN: Empowering the Future Nursing Workforce

As the largest health care profession, the nursing workforce is a major contributor for improved health outcomes and enhancement of the patient care experience. Despite our diverse patient population, this is not reflected in the racial and ethnic composition of the California nursing. workforce, resulting in concerns for cultural and linguistic congruency. Focus should center on upstream factors driving workforce inequities, which include lower rates of retention and graduation. among under resourced minority students in health care professional programs, including nursing. and medicine.

Developing an Advanced Practitioner Training Academy

California is in a critical primary care shortage. In 2018 an estimated 45% of Californians had insufficient access to a primary care provider. This lack of access leads to increased morbidity, mortality and cost of care. This shortage is reflected in my own organization Neighborhood Health Care, an FQHC in San Diego. To effectively care for all of our assigned patients, we needed to expand our current workforce by 20%.

Building Organizational Excellence Within Olive View’s Hospital Operational Leadership Team.

When thinking about organizational excellence within a health care organization, clinical efficiency and quality patient care immediately come to mind. Physicians and nurses who provide direct patient care take center stage. What about the radiology and lab staff whose images and test results ensure appropriate diagnoses? What about the schedulers that support patient access, the housekeepers that keep the environment clean for safe patient care, and the facilities management tradesmen who work to keep the lights on?

White Coats for Change

The White Coats For Change (WCC) project is a transformative initiative aimed at equipping and empowering health care providers to actively engage in civic activities and drive systemic change.

Physician Leadership Development

Effective physician leadership at the front lines is critical to our health care system as it grapples with worsening workforce shortages, burnout, and attrition associated with the COVID-19 pandemic. The national workforce deficit is projected to be more than 45,000 for primary care and 87,000 for specialty care physicians (Bhardwaj, 2022), and the annual cost of one physician vacancy per year is up to $1 million or 2-3 times a physician’s annual salary (Shanafelt et al., 2017).

A Public Health Response to the Overdose Crisis in Los Angeles County

Los Angeles County (along with California and the remaining United States) is in the worse overdose crisis in our history, driven by fentanyl and methamphetamine. No community is unimpacted by overdose, which spares no racial, ethnic, socioeconomic status, or age group. The historic response to substance-related crisis – to encourage people who use drugs to seek substance use treatment – is a necessary but insufficient response with when not paired with robust prevention and harm reduction initiatives that reach the people most in need.

The Intersection of Health Equity, Burnout and Trauma-Informed Care

The advancement of Health Equity, including the identification of outcome gaps and the development of processes to close those gaps, has become a major focus for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as well for managed commercial insurance plans. This project was designed to identify the most significant and urgent Health Equity opportunity within a county hospital and to create a pilot intervention to close high priority identified gaps.