Sharon Ostfeld-Johns, MD, IBCLC

I am a Med-Peds hospitalist — I spend half my clinical time taking care of hospitalized adults and half taking care of hospitalized kids, including newborns during their birth hospitalization.

I am a medical educator, training medical students in their early clinical skills and working with medical students and residents in the hospital, including as one of the faculty leaders of the Race, Bias, and Advocacy in Medicine distinction pathway for Internal Medicine residents.

I have research and quality improvement interests in diagnostic reasoning, reducing medical errors, breastfeeding medicine, and in improving health disparities. I have been working in the area of prenatal substance exposure since 2020 and in that time have collaborated with local partners including my pediatric hospital medicine colleagues, child abuse specialists, addiction medicine specialists, obstetrician/gynecologists, social workers, a Yale Law School student clinic, the Connecticut Department of Children and Families, community partners and others locally and nationally committed to improving care for families affected by substance use and substance use disorders. This work seeks to reduce the criminalization of substance use during pregnancy through clinical care pathways that guide clinical indications for toxicology testing in newborns and policy work to engage families with appropriately matched resources, and thereby encourage treatment access resulting in healthy families that remain together after birth.

I went to Oberlin College for a BA in Politics, University of Rochester School of Medicine and Dentistry for my MD and came to Yale for Combined Internal Medicine-Pediatrics Residency which I completed in 2018. I am mother to Cliff and Pepper, and an avid gardener, bicycle commuter, and Jane Jacobs fan.