Heather Briscoe, MD

I am primarily a clinician educator based at the San Francisco General Hospital in Pediatrics. What I am most interested in is addressing the racially disparate composition of children in foster care, in San Francisco in particular. I served on a sub-committee for the Mandated Reporting to Community Supporting Task Force, which aims to transform the mandated reporting system, especially in regards to concern for neglect when the parents simply need support with resources. My other area of interest is newborns exposed to substances in utero and their parents. I have worked on the establishment of Plans of Safe Care, building relations with our local emergency response leadership (CPS), slowing down the decision-making process around CPS to reduce bias & enhance understanding, spoken nationally about how to bring anti-racism into child welfare systems, and I work with Team Lily (an innovative multidisciplinary team caring for people who struggle to engage in routine prenatal care). Through these efforts, we have refined how we decide to use urine toxicology to very few discrete indications, and have been able to support birth parents with substance use disorders to enter residential treatment while continuing to parent their newborn if they wish to parent and there aren't other risk factors.