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Dear Colleagues,

We are pleased to bring you the latest Clinically Speaking Newsletter, this one featuring two articles focused on recent developments in the University of Â鶹´«Ã½¸ßÇå School of Medicine.

To start off, we spotlight a new position that was created to assist UCHealth University of Â鶹´«Ã½¸ßÇå Hospital emergency department patients who primarily speak a language other than English. The department recently hired Marina Delgado Hernandez as its first cultural care coordinator, tasked with connecting non-English speakers to primary care and other resources.

Maddie Ross, MD, MPH, assistant professor in the Department of Emergency Medicine, led the creation of the new role.

“A lot of it is getting them connected with a PCP,” Delgado Hernandez says in the article. “Some of it is health literacy and them understanding the difference between urgent care, emergency department, and PCP. Most of the people I help are uninsured patients and patients from other countries who don’t have a full understanding of how the health care system works here.”

This issue of the newsletter also includes an article about the Kids in Care Settings (KICS) Clinic at Children’s Hospital Â鶹´«Ã½¸ßÇå, which exclusively serves children in out-of-home placement. Launched in 2023 by the School of Medicine’s sections of general academic pediatrics and psychiatry, in partnership with Kempe, the clinic serves children along with their biological and foster or kinship families.

KICS focuses on mental and behavioral health, physical health, and coordination and navigation of care among families, courts, and child welfare agencies. The clinic employs a multidisciplinary team that includes pediatricians, a psychologist, a nurse care coordinator, a social worker, a community health navigator, a child life specialist, a nurse and medical assistants, and Spanish-language interpreters.

“Children in foster care have higher rates of chronic medical conditions and unmet medical conditions, higher rates of dental needs, higher rates of substance exposure,” Amanda Bird Gilmartin, MD, founder and director of the KICS Clinic, says in the article. “They have higher rates of child maltreatment, higher behavioral health needs, higher rates of suicidality, higher rates of developmental delays, higher rates of education attainment problems, and higher rates of incarceration, housing insecurity, and homelessness. Our hope is that KICS can help address some of these adversities.”

We hope you enjoy reading about your colleagues, and we look forward to hearing how your department is improving clinical care.

Anne Fuhlbrigge, MD, MS
Senior Associate Dean for Clinical Affairs