7th Annual Trauma & Resilience Symposium

Description: In the context of a struggling health care system and a traumatized workforce, how do we build the capacity to continue to provide care to our patients and maintain resilience within ourselves? Ryn will locate participants in the lineage of the Black Panther Party’s community health clinics and the women who cared for those diagnosed with AIDS early in the epidemic. Drawing on these historical examples, their impact on the care we provide today, and lessons Ryn has learned in the ER we will see that caregiving is possible even in times of extreme social, political, or organizational instability. We will discuss current strategies such as mutual aid and trauma informed leadership as approaches for building resilience in our work communities and in ourselves.

Overall Goal: The overall goal is to provide a framework for how to provide clinical care and develop personal and professional resilience in a socially and politically unstable environment. Participants will gain a broader understanding of caregiving by looking at historical movement for health care change and identifying the modern impacts that those movements had. Discussion will be centered around prioritizing the ethics of our professions and applying the concepts of trauma-informed care and mutual aid to our professional relationships and ourselves as clinicians.

Learning Objectives:

1. Attendants will be able to identify at least two historical examples of groups that organized to provide clinical care with limited resources to marginalized people.

2. Attendants will be able to describe at least 2 aspects of the philosophical framework for developing personal and professional resilience that applies to the historical context in which they are working.

3. Attendants will be able to describe at least 2 ways in which trauma informed care and mutual aid serve as tools for delivering quality care