Upcoming Trainings

Description

If you or someone you know is a community health worker, please join us for our upcoming webinar Witnessing: Understanding the Effects of Overexposure to Stories of Hardship and Trauma and What to Do About It.

In this 90-minute webinar, Dr. Weingarten will discuss how clinicians are overexposed to hardship and trauma. The resulting distress may come from the stories they hear from patients or situations they observe directly. Providers may also experience distress when interacting with those who set and administer the policies (e.g., insurers, legislatures) that affect the people they serve. The pandemic has amplified the conditions that challenge both patients and providers.  Providers may also have complex histories.  Current situations may activate providers’ memories of difficult personal experiences, making it harder to cope with contemporary stress. This seminar provides a framework for conceptualizing causes of provider distress, discusses strategies for building provider resilience, and identifies “reasonable hope” as a source of inspiration in the current context of clinical care.

Faculty

Kaethe Weingarten, Ph.D., directs the Witness to Witness (W2W) Program for the Migrants Clinician Network. The goal of W2W is to help the helpers, primarily serving health care workers, attorneys, and journalists working with vulnerable populations. She worked at Harvard Medical School (1981-2017), where she was an Associate Clinical Professor of Psychology, and at the Family Institute of Cambridge (1982-2009). She founded and directed the Program in Families, Trauma, and Resilience at the Family Institute of Cambridge.  Internationally, she has taught in Africa, Australia, Canada, Europe, and New Zealand, where she was a Fulbright Specialist. Dr. Weingarten’s work focuses on developing and disseminating a witnessing model.  She has written or edited six books and over 100 articles, chapters, and essays. Her work on reasonable hope has been widely cited. 

Description

The Transgender community is a vulnerable population that faces individual, familiar, and social challenges daily. Healthcare settings are not an exception to this unfortunate reality, where the access and quality of care being provided is affected by systemic, institutional, and personal perceptions and beliefs about this community. The participants of this webinar will learn and discuss the challenges faced by the trans community and how emergency scenarios exacerbate them. The target population are doctors, nurses, community outreach personnel, health educators, health administration personnel, etc.

Faculty

Dr. Miguel Vázquez-Rivera holds a Master's Degree in Research in Clinical Psychology from the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a Doctorate in Clinical Psychology from the Carlos Albizu University. He has researched topics such as sexual and gender diversity, suicide, psychotic disorders, high-risk behaviors in adolescents, and problematic substance use. He has presented his research in Puerto Rico, the United States, Mexico, Spain, The Bahamas, Colombia, South Africa and Peru. He has published writings on social responsibility on various topics in psychology in the Puerto Rican media and is the main editor of the book LGBT 101: An introductory look at the collective, the first textbook on LGBT communities in Puerto Rico. He works for the Ararat Center, is a Lecturer at the Metropolitan University, Cupey Campus and has his private office. Throughout his career he has received awards such as: Graduate of the Year 2015 and Psychologist of the Year 2015. He is the developer and coordinator of the 1st LGBT Intervention Certification, a certification created with the purpose of raising awareness and educating LGBT professionals. the health of Puerto Rico. He founded together with Lcda. Omayra Toledo de la Cruz the True Self Foundation dedicated to the LGBT community.

Dr. Yari Vale Moreno completed her degree at the University of Puerto Rico School of Medicine and her residency in Obstetrics and Gynecology at NY State University, Buffalo. She worked as Attending at the Albert Einstein School of Medicine for 3 years, where she furthered her knowledge in family planning under the teachings of Dr. Rashbaum, Dr. Gillian Dean, Dr. Amitha Murphy, and Dr. Laura McIssac. In 2006, she moved to Puerto Rico and worked at COSSMA in Cidra, and then worked for 10 years at the VA Caribbean Healthcare System. Since 2006 she has been part of the Department of Obstetrics and Gynecology at the University of Puerto Rico, where she teaches family planning to residents and medical students. Dr. Vale collaborated with the Z-CAN project sponsored by the CDC and the CDC Foundation and is part of the Board of Taller Salud. Focused on women's health, abortion rights, contraception, and quality of care for members of the LGBTQIA + community.