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.
Support for the Affordable Care Act is holding steady in California, with 53 percent of voters saying they support the federal health reform law, according to a new Field Poll. See the full results here.
Half of California voters say it’s difficult for them to afford health insurance, and nearly three-fourths of those voters say their costs increased in the past year, according to a new survey from the Field Poll. See the full report here, the first of three on health care and the Affordable Care Act to be released this week.
From Matt Perry When Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper rode their choppers across America in the 1969 classic “Easy Rider,” the iconic film helped popularize the anti-hero: adventurous, rebellious, and passionately committed to a life of freedom. For some older adults, these ideals never go out of style. In 2007, 17 Taiwanese motorcyclists averaging over 80 years old circled their home island to
We hear a lot about “safe streets” and walkable communities. But this short documentary by a Sacramento youth about a high school student who was killed in a crosswalk near her school really brings the issue home. Check it out. <iframe width=”560″ height=”315″ src=”//www.youtube.com/embed/up2r2ficVG0″ frameborder=”0″ allowfullscreen></iframe>
The California Supreme Court has ruled that school personnel other than nurses can administer insulin shots to children who have diabetes. The controversial case pitted a nurses union against school administrators and parents who believed state law allowed trained school personnel to give the shots with a parent and doctor’s permission. See the full opinion here.
Public policy affects all of our daily lives, but vulnerable populations feel the consequences of policy most acutely. In this issue, focused on children’s health, we take a look at how policy is affecting the most vulnerable kids in our state.
By Matt Perry When I started covering Aging issues for the California Health Report almost two years ago, one man’s name kept popping up who consistently impressed me with his intelligence, and gleefully shocked me with his iconoclasm: Dr. Walter Bortz. As the former president of the American Geriatrics Society, a current Stanford instructor, and author of “We Live Too Short and Die Too Long,”
If California is hostile to good jobs – as conventional wisdom often suggests — the rest of the country might want to try some of our brand of antagonism. Over the past year, California businesses have created jobs at a higher rate then the U.S. as a whole. But what kind of jobs? Is California becoming a ghetto of dead-end employment, of fast-food, retail and other low-wage jobs with limited opportunities for upward mobility? Actually, no… Daniel Weintraub’s weekly essay.
The term “validation” means a lot of things to a lot of people. For Naomi Feil, who founded and developed the Validation method in 1982 as a method for communicating with very old people who have certain forms of dementia, it has three distinct elements:
A basic, empathetic attitude
Principles that guide our actions and words
Nonverbal techniques that we use to communicate
In simple terms, it’s a way to move beyond initial conversations so you defuse confused interactions and get to the heart of the matter.
Recently I contacted Feil and her daughter, Validation master teacher Vicki de Klerk, who’s worked with her mother for almost 30 years, to learn more.