Rosie Nava-Bermudez decided that the Imperial Valley didn’t have enough resources for children and their families. So she created one herself – a place where kids can play while their parents build community.
Month: August 2013
If it sometimes seems as everyone in America has an opinion on the Affordable Care Act, come to City Heights. Here, the problem is the opposite: folks living in this impoverished San Diego community don’t know the details about the federal reform that is about to transform the way many people get their health care. That’s starting to change, thanks to efforts by a number of groups gearing up education and enrollment campaigns in this ethnically diverse neighborhood a few miles northeast of downtown.
A scourge in much of the world, tuberculosis has long been declining in this country. But TB has persisted among the homeless. And on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, where close quarters and unsanitary conditions help spread the disease, it’s made an alarming advance.
A day in the life of a typical paramedic is nothing like that of a primary care provider. Paramedics perform in a high-stress environment that focuses exclusively on providing emergency medical services, while a primary care physician is more focused on a patient’s long term needs. That wall between primary care and emergency health care may soon be eroded.
As Obamacare outreach efforts ramp up around the country, the question on everyone’s mind is ‘who will enroll?’ But those who are especially in the know wonder if ‘hard-to reach’ people will even understand that there are programs that they can enroll in.
Twenty-year-old David Navarrete tried to slit his wrists four years ago, in the grip of severe depression, a condition he inherited from his mother. Luckily he survived and got therapy – first from the Barbara Sinatra Children’s Center in Rancho Mirage, and then from the Harmony Center – a mentoring program at the Oasis Community Services in Indio.
The federal health reform known as the Affordable Care Act has so many moving parts that it is almost impossible to predict with confidence how it all will work once the law inches closer to full implementation on Jan. 1. But one very big piece of the Act is almost certain to roll out as intended: the expansion of the Medi-Cal program to accommodate more than a million low-income Californians who until recently had almost no access to the doctors, hospitals and labs that many people take for granted.
Pressured by federal penalties for high readmissions, some California hospitals are revamping discharge procedures and assigning health coaches to monitor patients for up to a month after they’re disconnected from the hospitals’ high-tech monitors.
The Southern California International Gateway (SCIG) BNSF Railway wants to construct a new rail yard a few miles from the Port of Long Beach, enabling a large volume of trucks to load containers onto trains closer to the ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles and angering residents who say their neighborhood already suffers from poor air quality.
No one in Victoria Jimenez’ family has gone to college. The incoming freshman, who will attend Alisal High School in Salinas in the fall, hadn’t really considered college as an option. Her perspective changed this summer, when she attended a one-week camp at California State University, Monterey Bay, run by Girls, Inc. of the Central Coast.