Santa Ana’s Laundry Love helps to fill an essential need that often goes unmet for homeless people – washed clothes and bedding.
Month: December 2012
Sixteen months after a coalition of San Diego nonprofit groups took the county’s most costly homeless people – highest consumers of ambulance rides, emergency room and police resources – and put them into permanent housing, the cost savings are adding up.
At the UC Davis Medical Center, we are formalizing a partnership between doctors and lawyers that aims to explore and address the root causes of the illness we see in our patients.
It’s no secret that California’s population has been getting more diverse for decades. More recently, the composition of the state’s electorate has begun to mirror the population. But the people who actually showed up and voted on Election Day have remained whiter, and older, than the pool of registered voters. No more. It appears that for the first time, California Latinos, Asian-Americans and blacks voted last month in numbers roughly equivalent to their share of registered voters. About 40 percent of California’s electorate is now non-white. And ethnic voters made up about 40 percent of those who mailed in their ballots or went to the polls Nov. 6. Daniel Weintraub’s essay.
Almost 20 years after first declaring a local state of emergency due to the AIDS epidemic, the City of Oakland continues to be struggle to get the disease under control.
Contra Costa County has only two family shelters, which have struggled to meet the demand for help from homeless families. Now both shelters, with funding from First 5 Contra Costa County, have started to expand their assistance by including services aimed at setting very young homeless children on the path to a better life.
The new Clinton Health Matters Initiative, which aims to reduce suffering from preventable disease and close the gaps in health care access that are related to race, income and education, recently selected Southern California’s Coachella Valley as one of its sites.
Santa Cruz County mental health staff and patient advocates in California predict that many children enrolled in the state’s Healthy Families Program, an insurance program for low-income families that will be phased out in 2013, should actually have better access to mental health services once they start transitioning to Medi-Cal in January.
Many school districts across the state have long required high school coaching staffs to be educated about the dangers of concussions and brain injuries, but this August Governor Jerry Brown signed a law that requires all high school coaches to complete concussion awareness training every two years.
In the continued political conflict over health reform – now centered on whether states will set up their own insurance markets, to be known as exchanges – it is easy to lose focus on whether health reform is actually working. We have, however, some very interesting early indications on that score. Some are positive, others are negative. Neither, though, fit easily into the talking points of either side in the political debate.