As California increasingly considers how past trauma impacts violence, a new community center in South Los Angeles is focused on healing. Rather than seeing violent crime as a problem exclusively for law enforcement, the Community Healing and Trauma Prevention Center seeks to understand and tackle the root causes of violence and its traumatic effects.
A first of its kind survey of California mothers about their birth concerns and outcomes offers two findings: Health providers often don’t listen to mothers about their birth preferences and African American women are the least likely to be listened to.
Disregarding input from pregnant women increases the risk of death and complications for the mothers and their babies.
A pilot program in Los Angeles County to boost the number of kids receiving vision care through the Medi-Cal program appears to have succeeded, even as utilization of such services has seen a sharp decline in recent years.
Environmental and community activists say the state is moving too slowly and not doing enough to protect children, pregnant women and farmworkers exposed to a pesticide called chlorpyrifos, a product commonly used on strawberries that is linked to developmental disabilities. They’re calling for an immediate, outright ban of the pesticide.
It is unfathomable that the Health Care department would single out this one group of economically challenged children to undergo this experimental program. Meanwhile, children who are financially better off do not have to go through this change. The result is that the transition is creating unequal access to health care for low-income, medically fragile children.
Statistics show kids and teens in Orange County use specialty mental health services at a lower rate than children in most other counties in the state. Fewer than 2 percent of Medi-Cal-enrolled youth under age 21 in Orange County consistently received a specialty mental health service in fiscal year 2015 to 2016.
At the other end of the spectrum are counties like San Francisco, where almost 5 percent of San Francisco’s Medi-Cal enrolled kids came into regular contact with the SMHS system in that time. While the percentage differences appear small, they represent potentially tens of thousands of kids in lower-performing counties who are missing out on mental health care.
Parents often don’t take talk of suicide by young children seriously because they think kids don’t understand the concept. But they do.
Two health plans that serve low-income residents in the Central Valley have consistently failed to meet state standards, recent reports show.
Health Net of San Joaquin and Health Plan San Joaquin, which serve nearly a quarter million Medi-Cal patients combined, failed to meet the state’s minimum performance levels for Medi-Cal health plans since at least 2016.
Every time a young person who suffers from addiction reaches out for help, we have an incredible and precious opportunity to find the road back to the youth’s full potential. Wasting that opportunity isn’t just a waste of public dollars, it is a matter of life or death.
That is why my organization, the California Society of Addiction Medicine, is sponsoring legislation, Senate Bill 275, to create clear standards for youth substance use disorder prevention, early intervention and treatment.
In California, the state’s key program for providing mental health treatment to low-income children and youth under age 21 serves just a fraction of those estimated to need help, statistics show. And while the pool of children potentially eligible for these services has expanded under the Affordable Care Act, the percentage of kids actually receiving help has declined since 2010, a California Health Report analysis has found.