WHEN IN DOUBT, JUST SHOW UP

Dear friends and colleagues,

We have had quite the busy first few months as a Society this year! In April, we had a very successful Legislative Advocacy Day in Sacramento with the California Medical Association (CMA), where we met with each and every one of our local legislators. It was so heartening for me to see so many new faces show up and join in the important work of speaking directly with our elected representatives, many for whom it was their first time doing so! Our delegation addressed a number of CMA priority issues and we passionately spoke to the imperative for the state to increase MediCal reimbursement rates for physicians to allow for real patient access, not just coverage on paper.

Finding the best path to become involved in advocacy efforts can seem intimidating, but I have found that sometimes just showing up is the most important thing you can do. When I was a resident, I was watching the news about the wave of unaccompanied minors crossing the southern border and I felt like I had to do something. After discussing avenues for us to engage, a co-resident and I decided at first to just show up—to attend a community meeting we had heard about that was being organized by community based organizations, behavioral health providers and social workers involved in the Latinx community. We were mindful of being the only physicians at the meeting and aware of having little expertise to care for the needs of these recently-arrived young people.

However, we did what physicians do best—we asked questions, listened carefully, synthesized the information from different perspectives, and offered to help in whatever way we could. We conducted focus groups with school officials, community clinic workers, and the teens themselves. The responses we heard were loud and clear that there was a pressing need for an easily accessible resource or program to help these teens adapt more smoothly to their new lives here.

These children were experiencing exceptionally difficult psycho-social transitions. The homes and histories they left behind often contained unimaginable traumas, their travels even more so. Landing in San Francisco alone, they then often reunited with parents whom they had not seen for years. Working with behavioral health providers, we developed FUERTE, a schoolbased, group-format, mental health curriculum which used evidence-based techniques to normalize and support these kids’ acculturation while honoring their identities. One meeting led to another, and after five years of creating the curriculum, piloting the program, hosting “train the trainer” workshops, and sharing the program through word of mouth, we were awarded a $1.5M Innovations Project grant through a partnership with SFDPH. I’m still amazed by how we accomplished so much in just a few short years—simply because one day, my co-resident and I decided to show up.

So thank you again to those of you who showed up and joined us on Legislative Advocacy Day; thank you to those of you who showed up to celebrate at our Gala; and thank you to those of you who have shown up and attended our committee meetings, our webinars, our in-person mixers—I know it is no small feat to fit another thing into your busy days. And for those of you who are considering our events and gatherings in the future, please know that you are more than welcome and I look forward to meeting you! It always amazes me what’s possible from the sparks that are created when people decide to just show up.

Heyman Oo, MD, MPH

Heyman Oo, MD, MPH is a primary care pediatrician and Site Medical Director at Marin Community Clinics in Novato. She also serves as an Information & Guidance Clinical Lead for the San Francisco Department of Public Health under the COVID-19 Task Force. She is a graduate of the UCSF Pediatric Leaders Advancing Health Equity (PLUS) Residency Program and obtained her MPH in Healthcare Policy and Administration at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. She has been involved in organized medicine since the beginning of her medical school years at UC San Diego and has been a member of SFMMS for almost a decade.