Dear CIN Colleagues,

Gratitude is the attitude this month! We hope you can take a moment with your teams to pause and acknowledge your organization’s accomplishments this year in improving services for the communities you serve.

The staff and funders of CIN are grateful to this community for your ongoing enthusiastic engagement, which makes CIN’s programming a success. As we wind down this cycle, check out some highlights of CIN’s events, publications, podcast, and resources from the past two years.

We also appreciate you for sharing CIN resources with your colleagues to grow the network. Please take a moment to share this link with colleagues and encourage them to sign up now!

As we approach wintertime and see a rise in respiratory illnesses, health care organizations’ clinical and administrative staff will be under increasing stress to manage the workload. A CIN Connections offers strategies and reflections from health care leaders about how to prevent burnout and manage mental health distress among the primary care workforce.

Learn about one organization’s multimodal approach to building a culture of well-being — creating a workplace where it’s okay to not be okay, to talk about feelings, and to get support. Get details on how to:

In addition, hear from health centers, IPAs, and other California health care organizations about how they are supporting their clinicians and staff. What can your organization do differently to better support your staff?

Meeting patients’ mental health needs and considering social needs that impact health are essential to providing patient-centered, quality care. But such integration of behavioral health services continues to be a challenge for primary care providers.

The California Quality Collaborative (CQC), a CIN partner, launched its Behavioral Health Integration Initiative (2022 – 2027) to support efforts by small and independent primary care practices in California to improve screening, diagnosis, and treatment of mild-to-moderate behavioral health needs of patients who face depression, anxiety, and substance use disorder.

Direct technical assistance and implementation funding up to $100,000 will be available to primary care provider organizations through the CalHIVE Improvement Collaborative launching in summer 2023.

Navigating change and steering improvement efforts require skilled leadership and teamwork. Staff from community clinics (FQHCs, look-alikes, or low-income/free clinics), county health systems, and public hospitals now have a special opportunity to enroll at a discount in the Institute for Health Care Quality’s (IHQC) popular Quality Change Agents program.

Through IHQC’s virtual learning lab format, individualized coaching, and deliberate practice techniques, participants will gain knowledge and skills to become quality/process improvement champions – or change agents. Topics covered include problem/root cause analysis, improvement science and theory, project plans, facilitation skills, change management, data visualization, and more!

The California Health Care Foundation is underwriting five free passes on a first-come, first-served basis; email cin@ucsf.edu to apply. Discounted passes are also available thanks to CHCF; see the registration form.

Medications for addiction treatment (MAT) programs include FDA-approved medications for opioid-use-disorder (OUD): methadone, buprenorphine, and naltrexone. Over the last six years, the Center for Care Innovations’ (CCI) programs increased MAT prescribers by 191 — equivalent to more than two active prescribers per participating clinic, resulting in an increase of more than 2,199 MAT patients. CCI's learning communities offered a structured forum to develop new capabilities, share best practices, and discuss lessons learned.

In partnership with the California Department of Health Care Services, CCI is launching another wave of programming with two tracks for health centers: the Equity Collaborative and the Learning Network. Don’t miss the related webinars on November 15 and 17.

California’s Department of Health Care Access and Information (HCAI) examines California’s health care workforce and identifies shortages of health professionals and service capacity. HCAI offers behavioral health programs to provide financial support for students and professionals, build training capacity, and develop career pathways and pipelines.

This grant program will support community-based organizations (CBOs) across California to recruit, train, and retain behavioral health personnel. CBOs can provide loan repayments, scholarships, and stipends to community-based behavioral health students and staff, as well as award hiring and retention bonuses. Grant applications for this program are due November 30.

No one experiences public benefit programs quite like the community members served do. As state Medicaid agencies increasingly focus on moving resources upstream to improve the health of the people they serve, there is a growing recognition that centering individual and community voices in policymaking is critical to address health inequities, including food insecurity.

A series of advocacy profiles from the Center for Health Care Strategies shares the voices of people with direct experience using public programs, such as Medicaid, SNAP, and WIC, and addresses the value of cross-program coordination, incorporating lived expertise into policymaking, and implementation processes in public programs.