The SIREN Podcast

Social care practice and research are often inspired by intentions to advance health equity. However, social care is often planned and executed without a clear recognition of and confrontation with the racism, particularly anti-Black racism, that has led to existing inequities. While the legally-sanctioned enslavement of Black people in the United States was abolished in 1865, many of its aims have been perpetuated through residential segregation, the War on Drugs, and the school-to-prison pipeline, to name a few examples. The SIREN National Research Meeting kicked off on September 15, 2022 with a challenge to our moral imagination: In what ways would social...

Health research remains ensconced in a heavily positivist, reductionist, settler-colonial, racial-capitalist “ritual” of knowledge extractivism and expropriation wherein credentialed researchers mine marginalized communities for data to (re)package and (re)distribute as their (our) own knowledge. Much of this work has focused on racial health inequities while, curiously, leaving unexamined matters of positionality, epistemic equity, and procedural justice in the production and curation of knowledges/narratives about racialized subjects (here, perhaps better described as “objects”). In the US, this production is dominated and curated mostly by White scholars—from tenure-track faculty positions, to funding review panels, to editorial boards, to peer-re...

Each year an increasing number of original research articles are published about healthcare-based social care programs and policies. However, relatively few of these studies measure the impact of social care interventions on different racial or ethnic minority groups. More information about differential impacts could help to improve the implementation – and ideally the impacts – of social care. During the SIREN 2022 National Research Meeting: Racial Health Equity in Social Care, physician scientists Crystal Cené and Monica Peek briefly shared findings from a recent review they co-led, funded by the Patient Centered Outcomes Research Institute (PCORI), which involved a collaboration with researchers from...

The final panel at the SIREN 2022 National Research Meeting: Racial Health Equity in Social Care featured four Experts by Experience (Lisa Hamlett, Mike McNear, Ann Reynoso, and Stephanie Walker) as they reflected on their takeaways from the meeting, expressed what was most important to them, and pointed out opportunities for more research and action. The goal of this session was for participants to leave the SIREN National Research Meeting feeling grounded in what mattered to patients with lived experience of racism and socioeconomic challenges, fired up about working in ways that actively promote racial health equity, and focused on...

In this episode, Sarah Coombs, the director for health system transformation at the National Partnership for Women & Families, and Janice Tufte, an active patient partner in research, evidence generation, measurement, and care improvement, discuss their reactions to the patient and patient caregiver perspectives section of the State of the Science on Social Screening in Healthcare Settings.

 
To read the SIREN social screening report and a bevy of related resources, visit the SCREEN Report webpage.

References

In this episode, we are joined by Cherelle Vanbrakle, MEd, the Director of Health Promotion and Community Advocacy at People’s Community Clinic based in Austin, TX, and Andrea Nederveld, MD, MPH, an Assistant Professor in the Department of Family Medicine at the University of Colorado, to discuss the state of the science about the implementation of social screening in healthcare settings.

To read the SIREN social screening report and a bevy of related resources, visit the SCREEN Report webpage.

People’s Community Clinic: https://www.austinpcc.org/about-us-2/

Resear...

In this episode, we are joined by Jaedon Avey, Health Program Analyst, and L’aakaw Eesh Kyle Wark, Researcher, both of whom are from the Southcentral Foundation in Anchorage Alaska, a non-profit, tribally owned and operated healthcare organization serving 65,000 Alaska Native/American Indian peoples in urban and rural communities across over 100,000 square miles of Southcentral Alaska. Emilia De Marchis talks with Jaedon and L’aakaw about screening for patient assets – not just risks – in healthcare settings.

To read the SIREN social screening report and a bevy of related resources, visit the SCREEN Report webpage.

Disclosu...

SIREN Senior Research Associate Yuri Cartier, MPH, sits down with Kalpana Ramiah, DrPH, MSc, CPH, Vice President of Vice President of Innovation at America’s Essential Hospitals and Director of the Essential Hospitals to discuss SIREN’s recent review of surveys measuring the prevalence of social screening activity in different health care settings in the United States. Dr. Ramiah shares how the review’s findings can be used by essential hospitals, and what other considerations and challenges remain top of mind for her as we head into an era of increased policy incentives and requirements around social screening.

In this episode, Andy Quiñones-Rivera, MD, MPH, an ER resident physician with LA county is joined by Loel Solomon, MPP, PhD, a Professor of Health Systems Science at the Kaiser Permanente School of Medicine and former Vice President for Community Health at Kaiser Permanente. The two explore the evolution of healthcare providers’ perspectives on social screening and what this means for the future of social care practice. Their discussion also begins re-imagining the roles and responsibilities of healthcare systems around social care activities like social screening.

To read the SIREN social screening report and a be...

On December 3rd, 2021, SIREN organized a special closing event (insert tears) for the 2021 Coffee & Science series. Special guests Bethany Hamilton, JD, and Kelly Doran, MD, shared their own takeaways from the series and asked participants to share favorite episodes and raise big-picture questions about how social care research can be used to move the needle on policy and practice. 

Reminder! Please let us know what you thought of Coffee & Science and your ideas for SIREN’s 2022 National Research Meeting: https://ucsf.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_7Otc9vpAIr8G9cW 

Voices you...