www.ohca.com FALL/WINTER 2022 The Oregon Caregiver 25 PROFILE this process of accessing services and how we can improve. I’m also really inspired by the possibilities. Human services touches on the basic needs of so many Oregonians. Everyone’s talking about, “how can we do this better? How can we lead to huge quality of life improvements for so many people?” The potential is huge. I also keep coming back to ending poverty. We need to stay on top of these things in terms of accountability and oversight during implementation to make sure that these ideas and bills we pass are fully vetted. I can’t not talk about workforce. In almost every aspect I touch in my legislative priorities—long term care, hospitals, childcare, teachers, behavioral health specialists, etc.—workforce is an issue; it’s something that we need to really continue to address and to do better. What role has diversity, equity, and inclusion played in your approach to shaping policies? Like many people, I considered myself as not being racist and I was out there with the Black Lives Matter marchers in 2020, but I have really come to confront my own implicit biases as well as the fact that it’s not enough to just say, “I’m not racist,” which may not actually be a hundred percent accurate. We all have implicit biases, but we really have to come to terms with the historic discrimination that still is harming folks today. It is really hard to rise above some of the difficult circumstances that your family is facing when you’re born into them. We need to really be conscious of unwinding that web as we imagine the future of human services because we need to be doing things differently. We need to be tapping into the voices of people who have been the victims of systemic racism and reevaluate everything we do. I’m really trying to think about what applying an equity lens means. We’re going to talk about that in our in our human resources meetings, so that it absolutely plays a role in shaping every single policy. We have a fiscal analysis of every policy, so we need to have an equity analysis of every policy. What is one of the biggest lessons you’ve learned as we slowly come out of the pandemic? Our healthcare and our caregiving workforce are incredibly dedicated, however, everyone’s pretty burnt out. We know how many people are leaving the system. We need to do a better job making these roles sustainable for people. Healthcare is still such rewarding work and people really are drawn to it and want to do it; we just need to make it possible for them to do it and still have the physical and emotional health at the end of the day. Overall, I think we’ve done an amazing job with COVID-19, especially here in Oregon. However, COVID-19 disproportionately affected people of color and I saw it every day in my clinic, whether it was the parents who were essential workers and weren’t home supervising their kids’ remote schooling, or the skepticism by communities who have been underserved and ill-treated by the medical community. Case count and death rates were much higher in our communities of color, so we really have to do better by those communities. We’re making some inroads there, but we need to hear from the communities and continue to ask and listen to those communities about how we can do better. How will the legislature help Oregonians prepare for and support the rapidly growing aging population? Workforce, workforce, workforce. I think there are a lot of ways to make work environments delightful and desirable. How can we help Oregonians age in place? What does that mean? I want families to start having these conversations. What does this mean for yourself or for your parent? How do we set things up 10 years before you need it? We talk a lot about early interventions in pediatrics and we’re certainly talking about early screening for dementia, the importance of early and often, and hearing screening as well as early amplification in an effort to prevent, delay, or stave off dementia. I think it’s still a taboo topic and we need to get over that. We have a wide spectrum of care here in Oregon. There’s probably something we can do even more creatively in terms of how to take care of older Oregonians.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MTY1NDIzOQ==