Join CFHA’s Families & Health SIG for a collaborative conversation about the health system-level changes needed to better support family-centered care. As part of CFHA’s broader initiative, we want to hear from professionals across disciplines:

• What barriers do you see in implementing family-centered approaches?
• What policy or practice changes would make a meaningful difference?
• How can we collectively push for systemic improvements?

Your insights will help shape future efforts in scholarship, education, training, policy, and practice, ensuring that healthcare truly prioritizes families.

We hope you will join us to learn from an expert panel on the ethics of integrated care. Drs Jennifer Hodgson, Tai Mendenhall, Angela Lamson, and Lisa Tyndall are the authors of a recent chapter on ethics in healthcare settings for Medical Family Therapists in the new AAMFT Systemic Ethics Textbook. This is a great opportunity for all clinicians navigating the complexities of ethical practice in interdisciplinary settings as well as for new learners in ethics courses this fall. See more info below!

In 2018, when a call to action for PTSD prevention and the need to expand behavioral health support was recognized at a systemic level, a partnership between Texas Tech University and the University Medical Center’s (UMC) Children’s Hospital emerged. UMC stakeholders wanted to develop a way to provide bed-side assessment and psycho education to patients in the PICU, NICU, and general pediatric floors, to help prevent the development of PTSD, and enhance the referral process for outpatient services designed to address risks associated with acute stress disorder and other pre-existing mental health and relational concerns.

Additionally, in 2023, key stakeholders expressed an interest in advancing Integrated Behavioral Health (IBH) by funding an expanded presence within Pediatric Oncology. This online webinar will highlight the key factors in the successful development and implementation of IBH for pediatric specialty care, the unique aspects of collaboration of a medical and academic partnership, clinical trainee experiences, patient-family-provider perspectives, and lessons learned during program development. Considerations for other specialty care settings will also be discussed.

Weight bias, the social devaluation, discrimination, and prejudice towards those perceived to be overweight or obese, is a life-threatening health risk and a prevalent experience for much of the global population. It occurs across multiple settings including the workplace, media, families, and healthcare. When controlling for BMI, weight bias has been separately linked to multiple negative health outcomes including higher BMI, poor metabolic health, increased blood pressure and Hba1c, higher disordered eating, increased sleep disturbances, greater health risk behaviors, and increased depression and anxiety. Collectively, these findings suggest that weight bias is a public health problem distinct from obesity. As primary care and behavioral health providers, it is important to challenge all types of bias and seek to understand how that bias may be impeding patient-centered care. In this presentation, we will discuss the impact of weight bias on health, ways to identify weight bias at the systemic and individual level, and strategies that promote more inclusive and equitable primary care practices for all people across the weight spectrum.

Presenter: Dr. Maggie Smith is an Assistant Professor of Behavioral Health in the Department of Family and Community Medicine at UT Southwestern Medical Center. She completed her PhD in Couple, Marriage, and Family Therapy at Texas Tech University and her medical family therapy internship and postdoctoral fellowship at UT Southwestern. She provides integrated psychotherapy and collaborative care for individuals, couples, and families within the department and residency’s primary care clinics, resident education for family medicine residents, and supervision for MFT students. Her research focuses on the role of the family system in biopsychosocial health outcomes related to weight talk, body image, and sexual and gender identity. More specifically, she is passionate about developing family-based interventions to target health disparities for sexual and gender minorities and individuals affected by weight bias. In her free time, you can find her reading, talking incessantly about Taylor Swift, and cheering on her beloved Auburn Tigers (War Eagle!).

At our February meeting, the FHSIG hosted our Annual Conference Proposal Match-Making Meeting. Last year’s match-making meeting contributed to the 40+ family-centered conference presentations presented at the 2023 conference in Arizona! Our Annual Proposal Match-Making Meeting allows for collaboration between members on conference proposal ideas. In addition to our match-making meeting, there will also be an opportunity to meet the 2024 leadership team and provide feedback on specific webinars and initiatives you would like to see from the Families and Health SIG in 2024.

Physicians’ emotional life is challenging. On top of the extra demands that Covid brought, the medical culture requires physicians to work long hours, to be exposed to patients suffering and dying. Moreover, patients expect physicians to act without mistakes and be perfectionistic bulwarks. Nothing less is accepted. The result of long periods of absence, on-call systems, and taking work home significantly impacts family dynamics. Families of physicians (medical families) have consistent patterns of challenging relationships. To decrease the burden of physicians’ work-related demands, healthcare systems run well-being initiatives focusing on individual resilience factors; however, relational aspects are also significant in helping our physicians feel joy in life. Based on several years of experience running family therapy with medical families, this presentation will cover some basics about family systems applications to clinical work with these families.

Using a multisystemic family model, this presentation will illustrate the value of screening and assessing family processes to promote optimal dementia care. This session will also address professional roles and responsibilities by discipline regarding post-diagnostic care, team collaboration, and communication skills.

In recent years, implementation of diversity, inclusion, and belonging (DIB) initiatives is a pattern that has been in the forefront of most business strategies. The practice of creating an diverse and inclusive work environment leads to greater employee satisfaction, greater opportunity to innovate, and a variety of perspectives. Implementing DEI initiatives requires examining an organization’s structure and culture to discover attitudes and policies to make data-driven decisions that would positively impact an organization’s culture. To address the process of implementing DIB initiatives and areas of consideration, this panel of professionals will discuss what this process has looked like in their respective organizations.

Clinicians and payers alike have historically struggled to extend beyond patient-centered care to engage family members in ways that are meaningful, cost-effective, and efficient with use of time and staffing resources. In this webinar, representatives from a regional health plan in Colorado and an evidence-based population health pediatric model, with providers in San Francisco, come together to discuss current and cutting-edge methods of funding family interventions in primary care settings. The presenters will provide key pieces of evidence that support family interventions’ effectiveness in meeting key outcomes such as reducing avoidable emergency department utilization and hospitalizations and improving condition-specific health markers, as well as sustaining long-term positive outcomes. Presenters will showcase specific examples of how clinicians can connect family interventions delivered in their setting to high-priority goals within health plans and at the state level, align family intervention outcome measures with high-value metrics, negotiate payer contract enhancements, and demonstrate a return on investment.SHOW LESS

The COVID-19 pandemic has proven to have pervasive impacts on all aspects of family life. Some of these impacts are drastically increasing as reports across the world are sounding the alarm about the upcoming post-COVID mental health pandemic. In a March 11th, 2021 interview, Dr. Fauci spoke of the “long-term ravages” that are ahead of us. These ravages (e.g., poor mental health across the lifespan, physical health declines due to delaying preventable services, and prolonged symptomology for those who have had COVID-19) are likely the outcomes of prolonged stress and mental anguish. These physical and mental health consequences will increasingly present themselves in healthcare settings. Using a multi-systemic and family-oriented lens, this presentation emphasizes the evolving interplay of public health pandemic challenges and mitigation strategies with individual and family processes. We highlight individual and family challenges with ongoing myriad COVID-19 uncertainties in the evolving phases of the pandemic/post-pandemic. These challenges include: (a) long-term COVID-19 health and cognitive complications (“long-haulers”); (b) communication issues amongst family members, and with healthcare providers; (c) issues that arise from divergent family member perspectives and beliefs about COVID-19 risk based on different historical, cultural, political, and ideological filters; (d) issues with loss and bereavement, racial injustice, and socioeconomic disparities; and (e) issues that arise from the prolonged exposure to stressors faced by healthcare teammates. Through the intervention of family-centered consultation, this discussion will offer strategies for addressing the nuanced and lingering biopsychosocial-spiritual impacts the COVID-19 pandemic has had on individuals and families. Special consideration will be given to the oftentimes unaddressed and invisible impacts the pandemic has had on healthcare providers and their own families. In a post-pandemic world, consideration needs to be given to all relational systems that come into contact with the public health, and healthcare sectors.

Webinar Objectives:

1: Enable HCPs to apply a multisystemic family-oriented approach to the ongoing COVID-19 related BPS-S challenges of patients and their families.

2: Enable HCP’s to consider issues that can arise from divergent family member perspectives about COVID-19 (risk, beliefs, anti-science).

3: Enable HCP’s to consider the impact of the pandemic on their own families and how it might inform their clinical work.

Primary care is an ideal setting to deliver preventative, family-based interventions. However, until recently a standard instrument to assess family health in clinical settings did not exist. To fill this gap, our interdisciplinary team of public health researchers, family scientists, mental health providers and a primary care physician, developed, validated and published a 10-item Family Health Scale (FHS) in 2020. The FHS measures: 1) Family social and emotional processes, 2) Family healthy lifestyle, 3) Family health resources and 4) Family external social capital. In this webinar, the presenters will discuss the development of the FHS as well as subsequent research and clinical applications in the areas of COVID-19 impact, obesity, couples research and integrated care pediatrics.

Webinar Objectives:

1. Describe the importance of assessing family health in primary care settings

2. Demonstrate the development, validation and screening potential of the Family Health Scale

3. Discuss current and future applications of the Family Health Scale in research and clinical settings

In March 2020, family- and relationally-focused biopsychosocial (BPS) health services in the U.S. transitioned to telehealth as the primary mode of health service delivery across the continuum of care. While many health systems are currently navigating a return to in-person care delivery, it is clear that telehealth will remain an integral part of our healthcare system going forward. Yet, to date, there remains little clarity on specific approaches to, or measures of quality in family- and relationally-focused BPS care.

Family-centered care maintains mutually beneficial partnerships between healthcare providers, patients, and patients’ families in treatment planning, delivery of services, and outcomes. Eliciting patients’ and families’ perspectives on healthcare priorities and relevant contextual influencers will contribute to more informed and better-defined health outcomes. In this webinar, the presenters demonstrated how to complete family-centered: contextual interviews, brief interventions, and relationally focused shared-decision making within the primary care setting.

Nearly 1 in 4 Americans provide caregiving for a loved one, a service estimated at $470 billion per year and 21 work hours per week. Many of these caregivers are unpaid and often experience stress and health complications. Human service agencies and healthcare systems are incentivized to help patients by identifying and supporting their family caregivers. However, the quality and feasibility of screening tools to measure caregiver quality of life are unclear, making it difficult for healthcare providers to effectively screen family caregivers. In this webinar we will discuss general properties of effective quality of life measures and share results of a systematic review to catalogue and evaluate existing measures.

Objectives:
Review the rationale for screening caregiver quality of life
Discuss general properties of effective quality of life measures
Shares results of a systematic review of existing caregiver measures
Discuss potential screening tools for use in healthcare settings