The COVID-19 pandemic has hit our healthcare workforce hard and revealed long-standing challenges that now are at the center of policy and practice change. IHPS has a large group of researchers with expertise spanning every healthcare occupation and every care setting, from community health workers through physicians and from nursing homes through tertiary hospitals. Much of this work is done in collaboration with Healthforce Center at UCSF, which provides a hub for workforce research and capacity building. This newsletter features some of the groundbreaking work IHPS scholars are leading in this area and how we are addressing the urgent need to reduce burnout, increase retention, and empower healthcare workers to provide great care for our population.
Joanne Spetz
|
|
IHPS Focus On:
Workforce and Education
Many IHPS faculty are researching and working on policies related to the health care workforce and education.
Janet Coffman, PhD, MPP, MA researches the primary care and behavioral health workforces and the impact policy change has on those workforces. Susan Chapman, RN, PhD, FAAN studies the community health worker/promoter workforce. Beth Griffiths, MD, MPH works to provide education to both the future healthcare workforce, and teaches the current workforce how to impact policy. Christina Mangurian, MD, MAS leads a public psychiatric fellowship. Beth Mertz, PhD, MA researches WAITING. Ulrike Muench, RN, PhD, FAAN researches the role of primary care providers in providing complex psychiatric medications. Joanne Spetz, PhD researches and serves in a national advisory role on the long-term healthcare workforce and nursing workforce.
Learn more about IHPS's current work to on the healthcare workforce and education. Read more
|
|
|
|
How to Impact Policy Webinar Series
|
|
How to Comment on Proposed Regulations
Lauren Lempert, JD, MPH
Center for Tobacco Control Research and Education, UCSF
Sep 14, 12 - 1 pm
|
|
Racial Disparities in Appointment Wait Times for U.S. Medical Care
Kevin Griffiths, PhD
Department of Health Policy, Vanderbilt
Partnered Evidence-based Policy Resource Center at VA Boston Healthcare System
Sep 21, 12 - 1 pm
|
|
UCSF-UC Hastings
Master of Science, Health Policy & Law
|
|
The joint UCSF/UC-Hastings Master of Science in Health Policy and Law program held its orientation for new students on August 11 and 12, 2022. A total of 16 new students have enrolled in this program, which offers full-time and part-time options, for the 2022-2023 academic year. The members of the incoming class range in age from 24 to 78 years and have diverse racial/ethnic and professional backgrounds. Most are working in health care administration or patient care. The curriculum is delivered online (primarily asynchronously) and students meet in person three times per year to facilitate networking with one another and the program’s faculty. Half of the courses are taught by UCSF faculty and half by UC-Hastings faculty. IHPS affiliated faculty members Dorie Apollonio, Taressa Fraze, Tracy Lin, and Jenny Liu are teaching courses in the program. IHPS core faculty member Janet Coffman co-directs the program with Professor Sarah Hooper of UC-Hastings and co-teaches the program’s Capstone course. The program will begin accepting applications for fall 2023 later this year. For further information, check out the program’s website.
|
|
In a recent article in the Journal of Women's Health, Christina Mangurian, MD, MAS and colleagues found that substantive stand-alone parental policies—available at just 14% of medical schools reviewed in their study—provided a unique set of best practice characteristics, which can be used as a guide for other institutions. Given the role of childbearing as a factor associated with gender disparities in academic medicine, UME leadership should consider developing detailed stand-alone parental policies as another step toward promoting equity for women physicians. These family leave policies are essential to ensure that the profession provides equal opportunities for all talented students to succeed in the pursuit of their goals in medicine.
|
|
|
|
In a recent Community Dental Health article, Cristin Kearns, DDS, MBA, Elizabeth Mertz, PhD, MA and colleagues explored the issues of caste and casteism in the U.S. as described by Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Isabel Wilkerson in her 2020 book “Caste: The Origin of Our Discontents”. The paper draws on Wilkerson’s work to explore caste as an analytical concept. It begins by defining caste and casteism in contrast with racism, the eight pillars of a caste system, the consequences of casteism, and the psychological drivers of casteism. The paper then applies the concept of caste to understanding power, dentistry, and oral health inequality. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the concept of caste and its relationship to oral health inequality must be understood it if we want to create real social change
|
|
|
|
In a recent Annals of Family Medicine article, Courtney Lyles, PhD, Urmimala Sarkar, MD and colleagues outlines the pillars of a health equity framework from the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, overlaying a concrete example of telemedicine equity. Telemedicine is a particularly relevant and important topic, given the growing evidence of disparities in uptake by racial/ethnic, linguistic, and socioeconomic groups in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as the new standard of care that telemedicine represents post-pandemic. They present approaches for telemedicine equity across the domains of: (1) strategic priorities of a health care organization, (2) structures and processes to advance equity, (3) strategies to address multiple determinants of health, (4) elimination of institutional racism and oppression, and (5) meaningful partnerships with patients and communities.
|
|
|
|
In October of 2021, California enacted SB 428, the ACEs Equity Act, which mandates commercial insurance coverage of adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) screening in addition to ACEs screening already covered for the state's Medicaid enrollees. California is the first state to expand ACEs screening coverage, but it is possible other states may follow similar paths given the increasing interest in policy action to address ACEs. In a recent The Journal of the American Board of Family Medicine article, Janet Coffman, PhD, MPP, MA, Jackie Miller and colleagues describe key issues under debate with regards to ACEs screening and estimate potential change in screening utilization and expenditures due to the new ACEs legislation in California. The lessons being learned in California are applicable to other states and the US as a whole.
|
|
|
|
IHPS faculty are responding to policy challenges raised by the
COVID-19 pandemic with rapid-cycle research and technical assistance.
One recent publication is by IHPS's Sigal Maya, Jim Kahn, MD, MPH, Tracy Lin, PhD, Laura Schmidt, PhD, MSW, MPH Joanne Spetz, PhD, Claire Brindis, DrPH, and Mohsen Malekinejad, MD, DrPH, along with their colleagues, "Indirect COVID-19 health effects and potential mitigating interventions: Co-effectiveness framework" published in PloS One.
|
|
Elaine Khoong is a general internist and assistant professor of medicine based at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital. She is interested in leveraging technology and implementation science to improve equity in delivery of primary care. Dr. Khoong is a mixed methods researcher, implementation scientist, and informatician. Her research aims to develop, pilot, and implement interventions that improve chronic disease outcomes for populations that experience disparities, particularly those cared for in safety-net system. Dr. Khoong's research interests are driven by her experiences as a primary care clinician caring for diverse patients within a safety-net setting. |
|
Rita Hamad:
Maria Raven:
Kim Rhoads:
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
