CIN Community,

This edition of the CIN newsletter offers valuable resources from our network of partners and collaborators working in health and social services to help your organization take its next step in improving care delivery. Resources below will help you to:

Thank you for continuing to share the CIN newsletter with your colleagues to grow the network and help achieve more. Participation in CIN continues to be free and open to all. And if you ever have resources that would benefit the CIN community, please let us know!

How can social service and health care organizations that are collaborating develop and maintain funding models that are sustainable for all involved?

Join this CIN webinar, led by Dustin Harper from the Institute on Aging and Amy Scribner from CIN partner Health Plan of San Mateo, to hear how these two groups have partnered to offer long-term care services outside of traditional programs and systems. They will discuss challenges and offer advice around shared funding models for community-facing programs.

Attendees should come prepared to actively participate in the webinar. Register now to attend or to be notified when the recording is available.

When SCAN Health Plan stratified their data for health equity goals for their senior members in Los Angeles, they found that just 47.5% of Black members were vaccinated for the flu compared to 60.4% of white members. They set out to craft a flu vaccination campaign to eliminate racial disparities in vaccination status.

Program Manager Chiamaka Ugorji at SCAN, a CIN partner organization, shared with us their goal to tackle three main obstacles for members: lack of easy access to vaccinations, mistrust in health care institutions, and hesitancy about vaccinations. Strategies included approaches in person, at home, and by phone in partnership with community organizations.

SCAN’s variety of tactics are underpinned with broader goals to boost health equity: make health a year-round undertaking; develop community partnerships that help deliver care and build trust; and use their flu vax campaign as a hook on which to hang other primary care services.

Applications Now Open: Managing to Leading Program in Los Angeles

Managing to Leading (M2L) is a yearlong, transformative leadership program for mid-level clinicians and administrative staff from community clinics in Los Angeles. The no-cost program equips emerging leaders with the knowledge, resilience, skills, and confidence to effectively guide change within organizations and improve health care delivery across the safety net.

Sponsored by Cedars-Sinai and administered by Healthforce Center at UCSF, the proven curriculum includes in-person, experiential seminars; an applied learning component; and facilitated peer coaching. See details on the program structure and seminar dates, participant eligibility and requirements, and the application process.

Initiatives to create change in an organization can face a wide variety of challenges. This training from the Community Clinic Association of Los Angeles County offers a road map to community health centers interested in developing their staff’s skills to: understand why people resist change, recognize roadblocks and navigate uncomfortable situations; learn communications skills that improve team cohesion, allow for open discussion, and facilitate the change process; and discover ways to overcome resistance and build confidence and comfort for effective implementation of new initiatives.

CalAIM, the multiyear effort to reform the state’s Medi-Cal system, is now in its second year. How is implementation going and what can be learned at this juncture? The California Health Care Foundation, funder of CIN, surveyed a vast group of implementers who reported improved access and more comprehensive care for people with complex needs. These implementers also surfaced significant challenges and important improvements that must be made to increase CalAIM’s effectiveness in the coming years.

Key findings of the survey report touch on overall access to services, program satisfaction, ability to manage client needs, payment rates, administrative burden, contracting issues, and data exchange.

Provision of care by workforces such as community health workers/promotores, doulas, peer support specialists, and navigators is seen as an antiracist strategy because it “shifts power through partnerships in which people who directly experience the conditions that cause inequities have leadership roles and avenues to share their perspectives with health care organizations.”

The California Pan-Ethnic Health Network (CPEHN) reports on nine lessons learned about such workforces that prioritize lived experience and enhance community agency, suggestions to improve existing policy to sustain and equitably integrate these community-led workforces, and other efforts to support collaboration.

Indigenous communities in California and the US face striking health disparities for which improvement efforts require cultural considerations.

Including Native American perspectives in discussions of health equity is essential to promoting optimal health. In a new Milbank Quarterly Guest Opinion, John Lowe calls on health equity researchers to foster partnerships with Native American communities to co-create research and interventions that promote equity and improve the health and well-being of Native American communities.

Dovetailing with this guidance, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation will fund up to $4 million in multi-year grants to support Indigenous-led systematic inquiry to enhance the health and wellbeing of Indigenous people and generate approaches to improve health equity, with an emphasis on community-prioritized investigation, elevating and integrating Indigenous cultures and knowledge-building practices.