By Dr. Michelle Schneidermann, director of the California Health Care Foundation’s People-Centered Care Team

Pictured above: At a recent meeting of the CHCF Health Care Leadership Program, participants in cohort 21 work together at a whiteboard on ideas for improving the state’s health care system. (Credit: Harrison Hill)

Succession planning is an often-neglected undertaking. It can be challenging to prioritize this essential task when teams are consumed with day-to-day operations. Some leaders struggle to face the possibility of a transition and delay thinking about the inevitable. Similarly, others may not want to dig into what a leadership transition might mean for the organization, or to them personally. Change is hard. Ambiguity and uncertainty can be scary. Yet, developing a succession plan is vital to an organization’s resiliency and continued ability to provide services and advance its mission.

Healthforce Center at UCSF is pleased to announce the sixth cohort of the Cedars-Sinai’s Community Clinic Initiative: Managing to Leading (M2L) program. Funded by Cedars-Sinai and administered by Healthforce Center, this program develops emerging leaders to foster the knowledge, skills, and confidence to effectively lead change and improve health care delivery.

Applications for the Cedars-Sinai Managing to Leading program close Friday, March 17

Imagine spending a year with a small cohort of staff from other community clinics achieving personal development goals, learning how to improve health care delivery, receiving coaching on communication and leadership skills, and connecting with a network of peers in Los Angeles – all free of cost.

By Dr. Michelle Schneidermann, director of CHCF’s People-Centered Care Team

Thirty-two fellows have been selected for the next round of the CHCF Health Care Leadership Program, which helps clinicians develop and disseminate techniques to improve the operations of California’s safety-net institutions and the state’s overall health care system.

Healthforce Center at UCSF is pleased to welcome five interns this summer! Working with interns is just one way in which Healthforce Center advances health equity by building pipelines of diverse health clinicians, researchers, and leaders. Internships such as these provides an opportunity for people from under-represented communities to learn about and contribute to health care as they explore the next steps in their careers.

By Sunita Mutha, MD, FACP, Director of Healthforce Center

If 2020 was the year of a collective reckoning on racial injustice across the nation, then 2021 was the year of laser-like focus on how to redouble our efforts to advance equity and become more anti-racist. As Healthforce Center at UCSF will celebrate our 30th anniversary in 2022, we are taking extra time to review where we've been and where we are going.

By Renae Waneka, Senior Manager, People & Programs at Healthforce Center

With September comes a return to classes at UC San Francisco, and a new cycle of learning begins. Healthforce Center uses a dashboard of metrics to support and evaluate its internal learning and development. This year, I expected our staff engagement scores to be negatively affected by the difficulties of life during a pandemic. But the scores were so high I was astonished. Learning can come with happy surprises!

“Structural racism.” “Institutional racism.” “Societal racism.” These are phrases that we commonly hear today that signal acknowledgement of the breadth and depth with which white supremacy maintains power in our lives.

These terms also enable some of us, as individuals, to maintain distance between ourselves and “it.” By talking about racism as something larger, all encompassing, and immutable, people can at the same time excuse ourselves from confronting the many ways we uphold and reinforce racism, according to Dr. Monica Soni, Senior Medical Director at New Century Health.