Utilizing Social Determinants of Health for Better Care with Maria Raven
Air Dates: August 22-28, 2022
The social determinants of health—how living conditions, family life, poverty, homelessness and other factors affect human health—have emerged as key factors in understanding health outcomes. Dr. Maria Raven shines a critical light on the complexity of cases she sees every day in one major city’s emergency room.
Dr. Maria Raven is a practicing emergency medicine physician and health services researcher and is the Chief of Emergency Medicine at UCSF and a Vice Chair in the UCSF Department of Emergency Medicine. She co-directs the Section of Social Emergency Medicine and Health Equity and is on faculty at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative. Maria researches and speaks locally and nationally about caring for complex populations, frequent emergency department users, and the link between homelessness and health. She has published and peer-reviewed extensively on these and other topics. A graduate of UC Berkeley and the Oregon Health and Sciences University for her MH/MPH, she completed her residency training and Master’s in Clinical Research at the NYU-Bellevue Hospital Center. She is co-editor of the first Social Emergency Medicine textbook and works on multiple funded initiatives to address social and behavioral needs in emergency departments including emergency department-initiated treatment for alcohol use disorder. Since March 2020, she has also focused on emergency department operations/preparedness in the face of COVID-19, and related research including a CDC/NIOSH-funded study on N95 reuse.
On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Raven discusses her work on social emergency medicine at the UCSF. She says, “taking care of emergency department patients really began to show me how much of healthcare and people’s health status was actually not affected by what we did in the hospital.” She adds an assessment of a patient’s social determinants of health and their effects on their current health status is critical to providing quality care.
“Story in the Public Square” broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. A full listing of the national television distribution is available at this link. In Rhode Island and southeastern New England, the show is broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Sundays at 11 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m., 5:30 p.m. ET, and Sundays at 2:30 a.m. & 2:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a partnership between the Pell Center and The Providence Journal. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.