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Community Spotlight: Heyman Oo and Caren Schmidt, Marin Community Clinics

Heyman Oo, MD, MPH, a pediatrician, is the Associate Medical Director at Marin Community Clinics (MCC). Caren Schmidt, PsyD, is MCC’s Associate Director of Behavioral Health. For the past six years, they have championed trauma-informed care and ACE screening and intervention at their clinic. Their work is a featured case study in the ACEs Aware ACE Screening Implementation How-To Guide, in which they described their experiences obtaining buy-in for piloting and designing the implementation process for organization-wide ACE screening, training staff on trauma-informed care, and expanding internal and…

June 15 Trauma-Informed Primary Care (TIPC) Advisory Committee Meeting

A Trauma-Informed Primary Care (TIPC) Implementation Advisory Committee meeting took place on June 15, 2023 from 10 am to 12 pm PDT. Members of the committee heard updates from the California Office of the Surgeon General, the Department of Health Care Services (DHCS), and the UCLA/UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN).

For Public Comment, watch the recorded session on YouTube.

Event Materials:

 June 15, 2023 TIPC Meeting Agenda June 15, 2023 TIPC Meeting Summary June 15, 2023 TIPC Meeting Slides

Community Spotlight: Deirdre Bernard-Pearl, MD, Santa Rosa Community Clinics

Dr. Deirdre Bernard-Pearl has been practicing Primary Care Pediatrics since 1997 and is the Pediatric Faculty member of the UCSF-Sutter Santa Rosa Family Medicine Residency and Santa Rosa Community Health. She shared her experiences incorporating trauma-informed principles to promote worker wellness at her health center in a past ACEs Aware webinar.

Community Spotlight: Sara Johnson, Obstetrician Gynecologist at La Clínica de la Raza

Sara Johnson is an Obstetrician Gynecologist at La Clínica de la Raza in Contra Costa County. She advances trauma-informed care in reproductive health and focuses on supporting patients’ power to create health and well-being across the life course and across generations. Dr. Johnson was the team lead for La Clínica’s California ACEs Learning and Quality Improvement Collaborative (CALQIC) project, which implemented prenatal ACE screening, and with an ACEs Aware grant developed a supplemental training entitled, ACE Screening and Trauma-Informed Care in Reproductive Health. She is the lead author of California Maternal Quality Care Collaborative’s recommendations for addressing adversity in prenatal care, to be published in the June edition of Obstetrics and Gynecology. 

Community Spotlight: Dr. Mikah Owen

Community Spotlight: Mikah Owen, MD, MPH, MBA
Director of Clinical and Academic Programs and Health Equity, UCAAN

Based in the Sacramento area​, Dr. Owen is a social pediatrician who has dedicated his career to improving the health and well-being of children and adolescents from marginalized and vulnerable backgrounds, especially those with involvement in the child welfare and juvenile justice systems.

Dr. Owen has been a long-time adviser to the ACEs Aware initiative and recently joined the UCLA-UCSF ACEs Aware Family Resilience Network (UCAAN) as Senior Director of Clinical…

October 2022 Data Report: 899,000 Medi-Cal Beneficiaries Screened for ACEs

The ACEs Aware initiative has released a new quarterly data report detailing the number of Adverse Childhood Experience (ACE) screenings conducted for children and adults in California and the number of individuals who have completed the “Becoming ACEs Aware in California” training.

Between January 1, 2020, and December 31, 2021, Medi-Cal clinicians conducted more than 1,153,000 ACE screenings of 899,000 unique Medi-Cal beneficiaries.

Between December 4, 2019 and August 31, 2022, more than 26,900 individuals completed the training, including approximately 12,100 Medi-Cal clinicians in…

Community Spotlight: Lisa James, Director of Health, Futures Without Violence

As part of a National Health Initiative on Domestic Violence, James has collaborated with health care providers, domestic violence experts, and health policymakers in more than 25 states across the U.S. to develop statewide health care responses to domestic violence through training, health policy reform, and public education. A former ACEs Aware grantee, Futures Without Violence (www.futureswithoutviolence.org) has developed curricula, webinars, and other resources to train health care providers on improving responses to violence and abuse. Currently, James is leading an ACEs Aware pilot project addressing the health…