Blog

By Andrew J. Campa, Los Angeles Times, July 29, 2020 Those annoying puffy spots under the eyes of eighth-grader Natalie Alvarez began to disappear, followed by the 10 a.m. hunger bouts and the midafternoon yawns — much to the Carson girl’s delight and surprise. At first, Natalie, 14, had resisted the distance learning thrust upon her when schools closed amid the coronavirus emergency. “I was worried about the distractions of being home with my mom and my sister and doing extra chores,”...

The organization Zero To Three estimates that in the U.S., a child is taken into the child welfare system every six seconds. “Many of society’s most intractable problems can be traced back to childhood adversity. Being in the child welfare system increases the likelihood of more adversity and criminality. Baby court is a proven approach to healing the trauma of both child and parent, and breaking the cycle of maltreatment,” says Mimi Graham, Ed.D ., director of the Florida State University...

An interdisciplinary team of clinicians from Brigham and Women’s Hospital had a bold idea in 2017. They would completely change the way things worked in their hospital’s emergency department so that the care provided to their patients was infused with a trauma-informed approach. That means recognizing how widespread trauma is and using a myriad of techniques to mitigate its harmful effects among patients, providers and staff. The realization of just how widespread trauma is came to light in...

Going out to buy groceries, going out for a walk, driving your kid back home from school. For most people these activities are normal, everyday things with little to no excitement, as they should be. Unfortunately, getting food, exercising, and supporting my son’s education have been a little more out of the ordinary for me. You see, I am a Mexican Indigenous man, brown skin, shaved head. My ethnicity and physical appearance are by no means unusual, especially in the part of the country...

By Ali Tadayon, EdSource, August 5, 2020 West Contra Costa Unified is rethinking what it means to keep students safe after its school board voted in June to end contracts for campus police officers starting next school year. It’s a re-evaluation other California districts are making as well, following protests over the death of George Floyd at the hands of police in May as well as students saying armed police officers make them feel less safe at school. Instead of relying as much on police,...

By Nada Atieh, Redding Record Searchlight, August 4, 2020 When Kaiser Permanente and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention launched the study to measure Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) levels in Shasta County in 2012, the results they found were striking. The ACE study examined categories of childhood physical and emotional abuse and neglect. It measured household dysfunction — including domestic violence, mental illness and substance abuse — that create toxic stress...

Coping with Stress During the COVID-19 Pandemic: One-Pager

By Nadine Burke Harris, STAT, August 4, 2020 The world is learning more about the uncommon but puzzling ways Covid-19 can show up in kids, keeping worried parents on the lookout for symptoms of the disease. We should also be concerned about how toxic stress brought on by the pandemic, or made worse by it, will affect children’s developing brains and bodies and their future health. In millions of households, kids are experiencing an incredible amount of stress and anxiety. They’ve lost the...

By Rhema Vaithianathan, Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Alexandra Chouldechove, et al., JAMA Pediatrics, August 3, 2020 Key Points Question Do children reported as having experienced alleged maltreatment and classified by a predictive risk model to be at high risk of foster care placement show an increased risk of emergency department and inpatient hospitalizations for injuries? Findings In this cohort study, children who scored in the highest 5% risk group by the predictive risk model were more...

By John Cox, The Bakersfield Californian, August 3, 2020 One of the Central Valley's largest agricultural companies has responded to the many needs that have arisen during the pandemic by again focusing its considerable largesse on the communities where its employees live and work. The Wonderful Co. was planning today to unveil a $1 million relief fund it hopes will prompt nonprofits to propose various initiatives to help local farmworkers, health-care providers and others who continue to...

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...

We are excited to announce our new brief jointly released by BARHII and the Public Health Alliance of Southern California titled “ Embedding Equity into Emergency Operations: Strategies for Local Health Departments During COVID-19 & Beyond. ” The brief outlines case studies, resources, and priority recommendations that counties and cities can take to explicitly and intentionally embed equity staff and practices into their emergency operations structures and throughout the public health...