Moving Health Care Upstream

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Guns and Opioids in America: Time for a Resilience Revolution

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Written by Wendy R. Ellis DrPH (c), MPH; Co-Principal Investigator & Project Director, Building Community Resilience Collaborative; Sumner Redstone Global Center for Prevention & Wellness; George Washington University

Disclaimer: Moving Health Care Upstream is a collaborative effort co-led by Nemours Children’s Health System (Nemours) and the Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nemours, UCLA or the Moving Health Care Upstream initiative.

It is truly astounding that we have now reached a point in our nation’s history where opioids kill nearly as many Americans as guns. And the trajectories continue to point upward. We have come to expect, and can even reliably predict, the number of Americans who will die by gun every year — and the rate of consistently high, hyperendemic gun violence in America is alarming. As for opioid deaths, we are not sure if we have reached a peak in the epidemic. These devastating numbers, and the traumas they impose upon families and communities, are uniquely American. [Read more…]

How Do You Build a Resilience Movement? Know when to lead, when to follow and when to partner

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Written by Wendy R. Ellis DrPH (c), MPH; Co-Principal Investigator & Project Director, Building Community Resilience Collaborative; Sumner Redstone Global Center for Prevention & Wellness; George Washington University

Disclaimer: Moving Health Care Upstream is a collaborative effort co-led by Nemours Children’s Health System (Nemours) and the Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nemours, UCLA or the Moving Health Care Upstream initiative.

We are now three years into the work of building a resilience movement, community by community across the country, and I am thrilled to announce a key addition to our Building Community Resilience family, Alive and Well Communities (AWC) based in the country’s heartland. AWC is a new partner who we will learn from and also support, and they mark an important point of growth in our work and the broader resilience movement. Together, we plan to broaden their resilience work regionally, beyond the individual cities where they currently operate: St. Louis, MO, Kansas City, MO and Kansas City, KS, which we are collectively calling “BCR MO-Kan.” [Read more…]

Sustaining Progress: The Building Community Resilience Policy and Advocacy Guide

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Written by Jeff Hild, Building Community Resilience

Disclaimer: Moving Health Care Upstream is a collaborative effort co-led by Nemours Children’s Health System (Nemours) and the Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nemours, UCLA or the Moving Health Care Upstream initiative.

At the Building Community Resilience (BCR) collaborative and network — based at the Redstone Center for Prevention and Wellness, George Washington University School of Public Health — we are working to improve the health and wellbeing of children, families and communities across the country. We do this by working to align systems to address the “Pair of ACEs” — adverse childhood experiences in the context of adverse community environments. Essential to our work is making targeted shifts in program, practice and policy arenas. Among our five BCR teams across the country, they are working, for example, to co-locate supportive social service programs where children and families are, they are shifting practice by implementing trauma-informed approaches in classrooms and pediatric offices, and they are beginning to engage elected officials and advocating for policy changes. [Read more…]

A community prevention approach to mental health can improve physical health outcomes as well

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Written by Larissa Estes, Program Manager, Prevention Institute.

Disclaimer: Moving Health Care Upstream is a collaborative effort co-led by Nemours Children’s Health System (Nemours) and the Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nemours, UCLA or the Moving Health Care Upstream initiative.

Over the last two decades, health leaders have increasingly come to recognize that the places we live, work, learn, play, and pray affect our physical health, such as our risk for diabetes or heart disease, or our ability to recover from illness. They have been less engaged, however, in applying this community prevention knowledge to influence mental health outcomes. [Read more…]

A New Guidebook Shares Foundational Elements for “Working as a System to Optimize Family Wellness”

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Written by Leila Espinosa

Disclaimer: Moving Health Care Upstream is a collaborative effort co-led by Nemours Children’s Health System (Nemours) and the Center for Healthier Children, Families & Communities at the University of California- Los Angeles (UCLA). The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Nemours, UCLA or the Moving Health Care Upstream initiative.

Almost two years ago, the MHCU Initiative launched an Improvement and Learning Network with a vision that of providing members of the Network transformational concepts that they would apply and turn into actions that could work at scale and be shared with others seeking better ways of optimizing family well-being by addressing the social influences on health. Communities that participated in the Moving HealthCare Upstream Improvement and Learning Network set out to design and test innovative care concepts that enable organizations from different sectors to work as a single system to improve family health and social outcomes. We did not have a set of solutions that could readily be adopted. We started with ideas that had strong evidence in other contexts for managing the care of families with chronic conditions, but had not yet been well tested in community systems for addressing family well-being. [Read more…]

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