Thread by @ChomiloMD

Excited to start my #SPHHealthyFutures day learning from this awesome panel about how we can help build resilient communities (& hopefully highflying ways to reinforce the resilience that already exists!)
🙌🏾🙌🏼🙌🏿🙌🏻

Cyrus Batheja from @UHC
“Understanding of peoples’ social circumstance has a greater impact than their medical circumstances. But when you connect the two you can have an even greater impact”
#SPHHealthyFutures

His recommendations:
🔹have a mindset of “what happened to you? Not, what’s wrong with you?”
🔹centering personal narratives
🔹providing clinicians w/tools to capture via ICD codes
🔹use the data to find ways to better meet needs & connect patients & systems
#SPHHealthyFutures

@katybkoz challenging #SPHHealthyFutures to see the connection btw how public health conversations around individual behaviors’ impact on health is actually systemic gaslighting

When we fail to address the structural inequities that are present we can’t truly empower communities

@katybkoz lays out steps to stop gaslighting & start empowering.

🔸recognize strengths, stop using “vulnerable”/“high-risk” terms to define communities
🔸don’t just share power, give it away
🔸ensure representation
🔸question what’s assumed to be “normal”

#SPHHealthyFutures

Atum Azzahir asks, “Who are you & who are your people?”

Points out that most students have never been asked to think about this & are often looking to others to answer it for them.

This impacts our view of communities & how we engage in research.

#SPHHealthyFutures

She highlights the People’s theory:

that a loss of culture, loss of community ➡️ makes you sick

And talks about Cultural Capital & Systems of Thought (African, European) as ways to research health through a lens of community strengths & processes.

#SPHHealthyFutures

“In this word disparity is an emotional connection with the word despair...so when we looked at infant outcomes we didn’t only talk about mortality, we looked at the children who lived despite the obstacles”

#SPHHealthyFutures

Elder Atum Azzahir shares some@her lessons learned over the years:

🔸Social support ⬆️ peoples health
🔸Social cohesion ⬆️ well-being
🔸Health empowerment is about connection, not just being shuttled off to resources

#SPHHealthyFutures

Cyrus Batheja talks about how they didn’t build systems but identified experts/programs that are under-resourced, then provided connections & resources such as data, legal & financial to lift up institutions that are the “back bone” of their communities

#SPHHealthyFutures