Keck USC 1st Annual Harm Reduction in Clinical Praxis 2021

Saturday, September 25, 2021, 7:30 AM – 1:00 PM, Virtual Conference, Los Angeles, CA

Harm Reduction Los Angeles was founded by a group of graduate and medical students at CDU, USC, UCLA and Kaiser Permanente with the focus of improving health, healthcare, and safety in clinical spaces for PWUD. We operate with the understanding that drug policy in the US has racist and anti-immigrant origins and is selectively enforced to harm Black, Brown, Indigenous and Immigrant communities. With this basis, we seek to disseminate information regarding care that is trauma-informed, human rights-informed, and whole person centered. We center our efforts on those disproportionately affected by systemic violence including PWUD, sex workers, LGBTQIAA+, undocumented people, BIPOC folks, and communities at the crossroads of these identities. Guided by the values of harm reduction, we aim to carry forward health justice work that affirms the inherent wholeness of each person and envision working towards developing and reforming systems to further collective healing.

There has been a rise in implicit bias training and understanding of prejudice; however, this conference aims to go further by offering interventional, institutional, and structural tools specific to improving care and outcomes for people who use drugs (PWUD). This conference aims to provide healthcare workers with an educational experience that translates into their clinical practice in order to dismantle treatment protocols and structures that uphold systems of violence against PWUD.