By Diana Hembree, Center for Care Innovations, April 7, 2021
Last March, as we launched CALQIC, a statewide learning collaborative integrating screening and response for adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) with the UCSF Center to Advance Trauma-Informed Care, the world was about to turn upside down.
“We had no idea what was in store,” recalled Megan O’Brien, program director at the Center for Care Innovations (CCI). “Just the day before, the World Health Organization had declared COVID-19 a global pandemic,” and CCI’s annual retreat had been cancelled. O’Brien didn’t know it then, but the quick informational webinar on CALQIC she led in CCI’s downtown Oakland on March 12 would be the last day she would set foot in the office that year. Nor did she and others know that CCI would be unable to hold its popular in-person peer learning sessions, coaching and site visits – the “secret sauce” it attributed to program success – for the next twelve months.
Like the CALQIC clinics, CCI raced to move its work online, including all in-person sessions with members of the far-flung learning collaborative. Clinics began preparing for ACEs screening and/or expansion, only to be subsumed by COVID-19 testing and treatment, as well as floods, wildfires, and a movement for racial injustice in the wake of the George Floyd killing. This March 16, a year and a day after California Governor Gavin Newsom declared a statewide COVID-19 lockdown – and halfway through the CALQIC initiative — CCI and UCSF hosted an online gathering to share and celebrate what participants had learned amid the chaos, tragedy, exhaustion, and heroism of the pandemic era.
Comments (0)