Building a Culture of Safety: Trauma-Informed Systems, Stigma Reduction, and Workforce Sustainability
This interactive lecture invites healthcare professionals to explore how stigma shows up in clinical language, policies, and unconscious bias—and how trauma-informed care and battling compassion fatigue can transform patient experiences. Participants will learn practical tools to increase patients’ sense of safety, choice, collaboration, and empowerment across care settings.
Learning Objectives:
- Analyze how stigma manifests in clinical language and organizational policies around homelessness and people who use substances.
- Recognize and become aware of one’s implicit biases and intersectionality and how it fits into the patient encounter.
- Enhance how one can portray themselves as a “safe” person and how an organization can enhance its trauma-informed policies.
Audience:
Prescribing Clinicians and their teams
Continuing Medical Education:
This activity has been planned and implemented in accordance with the accreditation requirements and policies of the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) through the joint providership of the Hanley Center for Health Leadership and Education and CCSME. The Hanley Center for Health Leadership and Education is accredited by the Maine Medical Association Committee on Continuing Medical Education and Accreditation to provide continuing medical education for physicians.
The Hanley Center for Health Leadership and Education designates this regularly scheduled series for a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit ™. Physicians should only claim credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
*Nurses and Nurse Practitioners will be awarded a certificate of participation with a maximum of 1 AMA PRA Category 1 Credit ™.
This course has been approved by Co-Occurring Collaborative Serving Maine (CCSME), as a NAADAC Approved Education Provider, for 1 educational credits. NAADAC Provider #324712, CCSME is responsible for all aspects of the programming.
Contact Hours 1 contact hours for social workers, licensed clinical professional counselors, and behavioral health professionals.
1 Category 1 Contact hours for psychologists. CCSME is a pre-approved sponsor and provider of Professional Education Activities for Psychologists.
1 contract hours CHES. CCSME is a designated provider of continuing education contact hours (CECH) in health education by the National Commission of Health Education Credentialing, Inc.
Speaker
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Cara Zimmerman MD MBACara Zimmerman, MD, MBA, is the Medical Director of Primary Care-Based Substance Use Disorder Treatment (MAT/OBAT) at Thundermist Health Center. She completed her Addiction Medicine and Internal Medicine training at Brown University and is a Clinical Assistant Professor of Medicine at Brown University. She is a staunch advocate for harm reduction in her primary care and addiction practice and is interested in quality improvement and systems processes, nontraditional forms of care delivery such as street medicine, and behavior change. She is also the Chairman of the Board of Directors of the leading harm reduction organization in the state, Project Weber/RENEW. She consults as part of the Opioid Response Network to teach colleagues about substance use disorder and loves being part of a multidisciplinary team.
