Community Health Track

Directors: Colleen Kraft, MD, MBA, Kevin Fang, MD, MPH, and Kimberly Petko, MD, MPH

Traditional residency training focuses on improving children’s health through direct medical care. However, it can also be enhanced on an even grander scale through a multidisciplinary approach that includes community education, physician-community partnerships, urban planning, research, and policy change. The IMPACT Community Health Track assists residents in planning and implementing innovative interventions that tackle child health problems from a community-oriented perspective.

Goals

  • To provide trainees with the skills to plan and implement effective community-based child health interventions
  • To appreciate and be able to navigate the social, cultural, environmental, economic, political, and human factors that affect the success of community-based interventions
  • To learn skills to lead a multidisciplinary team of academic and community providers
  • To understand the principles of community-based participatory research

Curriculum

In addition to the core IMPACT curriculum, the Community Health Track includes:

  • A public health curriculum
  • Community-based participatory research skills didactics
  • Team and leadership training

Recent Projects

Addressing immigration needs within the medical home

Los Angeles County is home to one of the largest immigrant and undocumented populations in the country. This project partners with our La Linterna clinic, which provides trauma-informed care combining medical, psychological, and legal support for immigrant families. To protect and advance the health and well-being of children who are navigating the process of immigration, this project seeks to develop a screening tool to address gaps in care, and increase the level of comfort of residents and attendings to provide legal support for medical justification of asylum status. This project was the recipient of our 2022 Gary F. Krieger Advocacy Award.

Gun violence in L.A. County

This project is working on understanding the incidence of gun violence in Los Angeles County and looking at how to work with community partners to help prevent gun violence and spread information about injury prevention. This project was selected as a platform presentation at the 2023 Pediatric Academic Societies Conference and a poster presentation at the 2024 Pediatric Academic Societies Conference.

Integrating mindfulness training for resilience in K-5 education: An exploratory mixed methods pilot study

There is a disproportionate exposure of low-income youth to adverse childhood experiences, which are known to have a cumulative detrimental effect on long-term health outcomes. Mindfulness training is a promising tool that has been shown to promote resilience in such a population by improving cognitive and emotional control, empathy, and stress physiology, with a marked decrease in symptoms of depression and peer-rated aggression.

Through collaboration between a public elementary school, the non-profit Tools for Peace, and CHLA, we have implemented a mindfulness curriculum to help kindergarten through 5th-grade students learn healthy coping mechanisms and resilience.