One third of California residents and half of the state’s children qualify for Denti-Cal, the state’s Medi-Cal dental program. So leaders in counties like Santa Cruz, where 82 percent of the dentists don’t take Denti-Cal, are seeking new ways to serve this long-suffering low-income population.
As health care providers struggle to reduce the tsunami of diet-related disease washing over communities, a national movement is pairing hospitals and community clinics with local farmers markets through fresh produce prescription programs.
Many middle and high schools across the state, plagued with cases of sexual harassment, assault and even sex trafficking on campus, are embracing two new laws making sex education mandatory for the first time in California.
Women in California with low-risk deliveries having their first babies have between a 12 percent and 70 percent chance of delivering by cesarean section. But where they fall on that spectrum depends less on medical necessity than on where they deliver their baby.
Will Nebbitt suffers from seizures and painful blood clots in his legs that prevent him from walking very far. A former addict, he spent more than 25 of his 59 years in prison and almost the rest of his adult life homeless. Men like Nebbitt usually die young and on the street, yet he’s had a home for two years after help from a Los Angeles County program based on a radical new approach to health care.
Eva, an undocumented immigrant and single mother in Bakersfield who harvests grapes to support her three children, suffered from daily hemorrhaging for eight months after delivering her third child. A physician at a federally-funded community clinic sent her to the hospital to get a biopsy for a uterine growth. But despite many trips to the emergency room to treat her symptoms, she was told that she would have to pay $450 before they would perform a biopsy.
In a suburban neighborhood on one of the busiest corners in Rocklin, California, Origin Coffee & Tea serves award winning java along with some awareness about human sex trafficking.
A Bay Area-based campaign is recruiting young poets and youth to raise their voices and start a culture shift to end the type 2 diabetes epidemic.
California is sending far too many kids with mental health issues to hospital emergency rooms, driving up costs, adding to their trauma and contributing to high rates of youth suicide, experts say.
A California statute allowing nursing homes to make medical decisions for residents incapable of doing that for themselves and who have no family or legal representatives has been ruled unconstitutional.Advocates for nursing home residents say the ruling offers long overdue protection for the rights of the elderly. Rights that already exist for prisoners and the
mentally ill.